Why is RAM usage so high on an idle server? [duplicate]

Posted by DeeDee on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by DeeDee
Published on 2013-11-01T18:45:40Z Indexed on 2013/11/01 21:57 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 133

Filed under:

memory-usage

|

rhel6

This question already has an answer here:

Why is Linux reporting “free” memory strangely? 2 answers

I'm investigating a server used for scientific data analysis. It's running RHEL 6.4 It has almost 200GB of RAM. It's been running very slowly for users via SSH, and after some poking around I quickly noticed that the RAM usage was sky-high. What's odd is that even in an idle state it's still using a ton of RAM:

enter image description here

I also looked via htop and I can't see that any running process is using more than 0.1% of the RAM. So I wonder what's going on? Right now the only user-initiated process running is an rsync between two NFS-mounted shares.

I tried rebooting the server and it was much more responsive for a few minutes, but then memory usage shot up again.

Is there any way I can pinpoint why memory usage is so high?

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about memory-usage

SQL Server 2005 high memory usage and performance problems

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi there guys. I have this ASP.NET/SQLServer2005 website running on a production server (Win2003, QuadCore, 4GB). The site runs smoothly normally, but after 2-3 weeks I notice a slow performance on the site (especifically in one particular page). Also I notice that the SQL Server process is using… >>> More
Coldfusion on VPS, how much JVM heap memory?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Recently I got a VPS server and I'm running Coldfusion, the website was running fine until it got more and more traffic and I started to encounter 'OutOfMemory' exceptions. I thought simply to rise the memory of the VPS server, but this didn't help. After doing some Google searches I found a setting… >>> More
Design approach, string table data, variables, stl memory usage

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have an old structure class like this: typedef vector<vector<string>> VARTYPE_T; which works as a single variable. This variable can hold from one value over a list to data like a table. Most values are long,double, string or double [3] for coordinates (x,y,z). I just convert them as… >>> More
Normal memory usage in Rails

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm wondering how much memory usage is normal for a ruby process in a rails application? I really need something to benchmark against. In my dev environment WEBrick a single ruby process uses about 61mb to handle 10 simultaneous requests going non stop. In my prod environment Apache2+Passenger starts… >>> More
C++ memory usage

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hi. I have pointer str: char * str = new char[10]; I'm using this memory for store data. How can I allocate more bytes for str and don't lost old data from str? >>> More

Related posts about rhel6

LUKS with LVM, mount is not persistent after reboot

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have created a Logical vol and used luks to encrypt it. But while rebooting the server. I get a error message (below), therefore I would have to enter the root pass and disable the /etc/fstab entry. So mount of the LUKS partition is not persistent during reboot using LUKS. I have this setup on RHEL6… >>> More
Account Lockout with pam_tally2 in RHEL6

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I am using pam_tally2 to lockout accounts after 3 failed logins per policy, however, the connecting user does not receive the error indicating pam_tally2's action. (Via SSH.) I expect to see on the 4th attempt: Account locked due to 3 failed logins No combination of required or requisite or the… >>> More
How to configure wpa_supplicant on RHEL6?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I am running a version of RHCE6 on my laptop. I uninstalled the default NetworkManager in order that I could configure the network all in the command line. The Ethernet part is okay, but I have problem bringing up the wireless interface. What I got is: Bringing up interface wlan0: Determining… >>> More
Setting up quotas on 64-bit RHEL6 OS with ext4 filesystem

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Setting up a new 64 bit RHEL 6 server with ext4 FS. Have only worked with ext3 and 32bit RHEL5 before. No matter what I try, I cannot get it to work. Current settings for mount (from "mount" command): /dev/sda7 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) devpts… >>> More
Linux Scheduler (not using all cores on multi-core machine) RHEL6

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I'm seeing strange behavior on one of my servers (running RHEL 6). There seems to be something wrong with the scheduler. Here's the test program I'm using: #include <stdio.h> #include <unistd.h> #include <stdlib.h> void RunClient(int i) { printf("Starting client %d\n", i); … >>> More