Hi list, I'm facing a problem with lenny regarding to memory usage.
I have 4 VM lenny based on top of a VMWare ESXi. The system is running for a few days and top command shows a very high amount of memory consumption for each server. I have a little knowledge of how linux (kernel 2.6) manages memory. A nice resource I found is this: http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/Linux%20Memory%20Management.htm So, I understand that cached memory may be free if some application requires it but I don't understand why lenny is consuming 2GB of physical memory. It's worth to mention that all the systems are running with only the standard package installed and few additional daemons for each server. I post what top command shows in order to provide better clues of what's going on: Server1: top - 18:47:12 up 12 days, 3:57, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 53 total, 2 running, 51 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Mem: 3097764k total, 2901684k used, 196080k free, 156460k buffers Swap: 578300k total, 0k used, 578300k free, 592736k cached additional daemons -> apache2, bind9, sshd Server2: top - 18:48:30 up 12 days, 2:29, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 55 total, 1 running, 54 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Mem: 3097764k total, 2412008k used, 685756k free, 145204k buffers Swap: 915664k total, 0k used, 915664k free, 155112k cached additional daemons -> apache2, sshd Server3: top - 18:52:10 up 12 days, 2:32, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 72 total, 1 running, 71 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Mem: 3097764k total, 2263200k used, 834564k free, 49152k buffers Swap: 2928632k total, 0k used, 2928632k free, 107700k cached additional daemons -> lvm, sshd Server4: top - 16:50:19 up 1 day, 6:42, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 58 total, 1 running, 57 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Mem: 3097764k total, 272300k used, 2825464k free, 126164k buffers Swap: 1341388k total, 0k used, 1341388k free, 53196k cached additional daemons -> bind9, sldap, samba, sshd -------------------- Note that I've recently rebooted Server4 and it has lower memory consumption rather than the others and it is running more daemons. May be this issue is a misconfiguration of my servers or a memory leak? Should I tweak something in order to improve memory management? Any help would be much appreciated. PD: Apache2 is installed using default configuration of the Apache2 official Debian release.
