Memory Usage - any optimizations?

[jonathankonrad]

I recently changed my Amahi install to reside on an Acer A340 home server. They journey was bumpy but the box feels stable now and it's tough to beat the very low watt draw and all the drive space.

Right now my only concern seems to be memory usage. The 2 GBs of ram I have on the system is nearly in full use at all times. This was not the case on previous builds (I have never had more than 2 GBs of RAM and it usually had half the utilization I'm seeing).

I have a few apps installed but the only ones that may take up resources would be AmahiTunes and MiniDLNA. I had these installed and more on previous Amahi servers without a problem and I have not even started using these services on the network. How do I begin to check which processes are eating up memory? I ran htop and all the processes are reporting 0.1% - 2.5%. There must be something else loading and taking up space?

Thanks for any help.

[bgrablin]

If you can get to the gnome desktop, go to your resource manager and sort by mem. I had a memory leak problem recently with a printer daemon. I was able to identify the process the aforementioned way, and kill it.

[moredruid]

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/s ... %7Clang_nl

or original: http://www.linuxatemyram.com (seems to be unavailable).

Memory tuning on Linux is a craft. Not many people really _really_ understand how it works and how changes may have an opposite effect if combined.

A normal install should be fine for most use cases, including Amahi. Personally I've never seen the need to tweak any kernel parameters on my Amahi box.

[jonathankonrad]

Great tip I followed this section of the website you mentioned:

"Too see how much ram is free to use for your applications, run free -m and look at the row that says "-/+ buffers/cache" in the column that says "free". That is your answer in megabytes:"

And I can see that I have lots of RAM available for programs. I'm not sure why so much is used for caching but I'm sure that's OK. Thanks again for the time

My RAM details:
[root@hda ~]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2003 1753 250 0 348 1013
-/+ buffers/cache: 391 1612
Swap: 2047 0 2047

[moredruid]

caching is nothing more than keeping files in memory so they can be given out from memory instead of from disk if requested. Since this part of RAM would otherwise be unused Linux utilises this for file caching. The philosophy is: you paid for the RAM, it consumes power so why not put it to work?