The free ram as reported by top should only be a few MB when a server has been in use for a while. What is not used by applications should be used by bufffer/cache.
See the output of free for a better reading of "free" ram. What to watch is the swap usage. On a Squid server the swap usage should be low and not increasing. This said, there has been a number of memory leaks in early Linux-2.4 kernels. Upgrading to a current 2.4 kernel is most likely recommended. The most commonly hit issue by Squid useds it that the ipchains REDIRECT target was utterly broken up to 2.4.18 something. Use the native Linux-2.4 iptables command instead. Regards Henrik On Tuesday 28 January 2003 08.18, Tushar Gupta wrote: > Hi, > > We are using squid for caching, with SCSI disk and 512 MB RAM. The > cache_mem setting in squid.conf is 64 MB. After running for several > hours total free RAM (as seen by top command) reduces to few > kilobytes and server response time increases (CPU idle cycles also > go to zero), and we need to reboot the server. Though as percentage > of total CPU usage squid is usually taking around 15-30%CPU and > percentage of RAM as 12-15%MEM . After rebooting the server would > again run fine for several hours say half a day, and then RAM would > gradually get consumed again. > > It is Linux 7.1 , Kernel 2.4.2-2 on i686 (PII 350 Mhz), squid > version 2.3.stable4. Server also has other services like DNS/qmail > but they take negligible CPU/RAM > > Any suggestions are welcome. > > Thanks > Tushar
