Question

What is all this memory used for?

Posted on October 10, 2018
Ubuntu 16.04 Server Optimization DigitalOcean
Asked by musicmouse

In Virtualmin I got an overview of my running processes. I thought my 2GB server was more than enough - for application I use 512M is the recommended minimum. But when I see the statistics much of those 2GB is used. What is happening? Why is Digital Ocean consuming so much itself?

Real memory: 1.97 GB total / 993.90 MB free / 726.32 MB cached

1597 root 835.54 MB /usr/lib/snapd/snapd 1743 nobody 775.73 MB /opt/digitalocean/bin/do-agent -log_syslog 1621 clamav 598.76 MB /usr/sbin/clamd --foreground=true 1789 mysql 556.29 MB /usr/sbin/mysqld 1250 www-data 229.91 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start 1251 www-data 229.80 MB /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

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unixynet • October 10, 2018

Accepted Answer

I suspect those values are virtual memory usage not the actual memory being used right now. The difference is that, for example, the 835MB snapd is using includes the shared libraries, plus memory that’s been swapped out, and unused memory. You’ll need to run top like this from the command line to figure out the exact memory usage:

musicmouse • October 10, 2018

Thank you for your answer. That explains a lot. It leaves one question: why is Digital Ocean using so much?