Memory not clearing down.

[Job Cacka]

"In our case the building AC turns off on the weekends, so these boxes all
worked fine when we got them, but they slowly degraded over the course of 6
months due to the heat of the weekends."

We had a similar scenario due to AC being off on the weekends. Over Labor
Day weekend (3 days) it got warm enough to cook a server's power supply
nicely, and we were then able to convince management that Auxilary AC was
required just for the server room. The main AC still does most of the work,
but during warm night's and on the Weekends the Aux AC kicks in and keeps it
about 75°F in the server room. For a cool $7000 we are able to keep well
over $150,000 dollars worth of hardware cool. This does not count the
several hundred or so man hours of rebuilding the configurations of the
systems from backups.

Job Cacka

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Allen Smith
Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 8:55 AM
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: Memory not clearing down.


In unix land unused memory is wasted memory. The system will use it to cache
disk pages if nothing else needs it, so it's normal for memory usage to
climb over time.

Segfaults (signal 11) are usually a sign of bad memory or some other
hardware component. We had a rash of these. Root cause was not enough
cooling in the systems causing failed memory and failed power supply's.
Added fans, replaced a few power supplies and DIMMS and slowed memory down
to 166 from 200 where it didn't matter. Systems are rock solid now.

In our case the building AC turns off on the weekends, so these boxes all
worked fine when we got them, but they slowly degraded over the course of 6
months due to the heat of the weekends.

# up2date -i memtest86+
# memtest-setup

Reboot, select memtest from menu and let run for a few hours at least, over
the weekend even better.

-Allen

On Friday 20 January 2006 08:44, Andrew.Bridgeman at corusgroup.com wrote:
>
> We are currently running 30 ish Redhat WS version 3 machines and are
having
> a problem with the memory showing 95% used when the machine is idle and
not
> being used. I have had this problem in the past but it has never really
> caused a problem but recently we have been getting segmentation errors on
> the machines and i think it is linked to this memory issue.
>
> Has anyone come across this before? If so how did you fix it? What could i
> do to get it to release memory as soon as things have finished running.
>
> Any help would be much appreciated.
>
> Regards
>
> Andrew Bridgeman

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