I'm using about 49% of the memory on my Raq 4i 128mb and most of my site isn't transferred over yet. At what percentage will Server Management consider this a "problem" or "severe problem"? And what about CPU Usage? It's only at 0.03 now.

49% of your RAM, or 49% of your hard disk? Your website lives on your hard disk, not your RAM.

random access MEMORY

Right.

As I said, your site lives on your hard disk, not in your ram. What're you worrying about?

Your ram is used by things such as your kernel, the daemons you're running (ftpd, telnetd, sshd, smtpd, named, httpd, identd, and mysqld and what not). If you want to reduce the amount of memory they use, remove the unnecessary ones, or convert the daemons to ones with a smaller memory footprint.

FWIW, my box with the kernel, sshd, postfix, djbdns (dnscache+tinydns+axfrdns+autoaxfr), pidentd, apache eat < 30megs of ram.

I didn't ask how many daemons you could name. I asked at what percentage will Server Management mark memory usage as a problem.

Nice. My train of thought originally came about because you said you're using 49% of your memory, and half of your site isn't transferred over yet. My point is that the amount of memory in use doesn't so much vary with the size of your website as with the daemons sitting there taking up memory, as well as the number of concurrent processes/threads and the book-keeping for each of them.

I don't know at what point Cobalt's server management would start to think that it's becoming a problem. I'd suggest that 'server management' software probably won't have as good an idea of the load profile your server gets as you would yourself. Ceteris paribus, a server that uses lots of small, frequently accessed files probably benefits more from having that cached than a server that provides less downloads of relatively larger files.

You basically only really need enough memory to ensure that all of your active daemons don't get swapped out. The rest of your ram just acts as buffers and cache. Obviously more of the latter leads to higher performance.

You can use vmstat to gauge how loaded your server really is. Pay special attention to si/so (amount of memory swapped in and out) and bi/bo (number of blocks sent to and received from block devices, typically hard disks). Running it without parameters gives the average values since boot-up; run it with a parameter delay to see statistics for activity that has happened during the delay time interval.

The vmstat man page has more information you're likely to be interested in if you try this out. Be sure to run it during times of peak activity.

A load average of 0.03 is nothing to worry about.

The cobalt software will only warn you once you start to use swap space. Once that starts to happen your load will be extremely high, you will no when it happens.

50% memory usage is typical for a RaQ4. You don't have to worry about it.