Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Ram Question

[Matrix]

How do you know if your ram is bad?

1 of my servers the ram is always about 80% used even late at night when theres hardly anyone on my sites. Could it be a bad stick of ram or could there be another problem?

[Steven]

how are you determining your ram usage?

[Matrix]

Doing a Top command

[Jakiao]

In a linux server, RAM is generally always 80 to 100% in use but mostly in cache. If you could, paste what you get with this command: free -m

I have 1GB ram and the following output:

[root@chii root]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2027       2004         22          0         47       1090
-/+ buffers/cache:        866       1160
Swap:         4000         89       3911

It says 22MB free; however, notice I have 1090 MB cached. I have 1112MB usable RAM total. This is how linux effectively uses all RAM to make things faster.

[Matrix]

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2012 1910 102 0 123 1465
-/+ buffers/cache: 321 1691
Swap: 1992 0 1992

[Jakiao]

You have 1,465 MB in the cache. You have -plenty- of ram available. As I said, Linux places RAM into the cache to allow it to be used effectively. Unlike Windows, which uses the minimal amount of ram and lets the rest go unused.

When determining how much RAM you have available, take the "free" amount and add it to the "cached" amount.