Memory usage apparently higher than expected

[shadowone]

Hello,
I know that this is a very old thread, but i have the same issue of understanding the "Memory Used" System Information in cpanel nowadays.
On centos 6 the above explains a lot to me, but now on centos 7 servers i am confused again:

# cpanel
Memory Used    56.55% (9,191,032 of 16,252,132)

# free
  total  used  free  shared  buff/cache  available
Mem:  16252132  3535108  722616  1400968  11994408  10804056
Swap:  10485756  157680  10328076

# top
KiB Mem : 16252132 total,  215900 free,  4097960 used, 11938272 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 10485756 total, 10327244 free,  158512 used. 10241320 avail Mem

# htop
5.45G/15.5G

Can anyone explain where this number (9,191,032) came from?

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

As of cPanel version 11.50, the memory usage information you see in Web Host Manager now comes from the "/proc/meminfo" file instead of the "free" command:

Fixed case 189013: Correct memory usage % on all Linux versions.

Thank you.

 

[hicom]

Hello, I had to open this post as it pointed to where cPanel is grabbing the memory information.

On our 32GB cPanel server, free -m shows 24GB of available RAM, while cPanel reports only 10% is available.

Running cat /proc/meminfo yields: MemAvailable: 26GB, MemFree: 1GB, yet our SWAP is 4GB in size even though there appears to be plenty of memory.

MemTotal: 32667880 kB
MemFree: 1372040 kB
MemAvailable: 26649868 kB
Buffers: 0 kB
Cached: 1685240 kB
SwapCached: 365548 kB
Active: 4001156 kB
Inactive: 1652532 kB
Active(anon): 2984124 kB
Inactive(anon): 1088784 kB
Active(file): 1017032 kB
Inactive(file): 563748 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 7812092 kB
SwapFree: 3575112 kB
Dirty: 2080 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 3609480 kB
Mapped: 140136 kB
Shmem: 104412 kB
Slab: 25229836 kB
SReclaimable: 24034920 kB
SUnreclaim: 1194916 kB
KernelStack: 8096 kB
PageTables: 53232 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 24146032 kB
Committed_AS: 6612956 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 362612 kB
VmallocChunk: 34342256804 kB
HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 1169408 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
DirectMap4k: 146916 kB
DirectMap2M: 9181184 kB
DirectMap1G: 26214400 kB

 

[cPanelMichael]

On our 32GB cPanel server, free -m shows 24GB of available RAM, while cPanel reports only 10% is available.

Could you post a screenshot of what you see in the WHM interface? The "Available" memory should not display as a percentage, but instead should match closely to the "MemAvailable" value in the /proc/meminfo file.

Thank you.

 

[hicom]

The SWAP is being used up after few days, reaching 3-5GB of SWAP usage and rising up, so there must be a memory consumption or the Kernel is not releasing the cached memory.

Our setup is CentOS 7.2 64bit, CloudLinux 7, Apache with MemCache Module memory caching (which I'm suspecting the culprit here)

This is WHM:

This is cat /proc/meminfo:

cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:  32667880 kB
MemFree:  1064456 kB
MemAvailable:  25222012 kB
Buffers:  0 kB
Cached:  3673240 kB
SwapCached:  884440 kB
Active:  5921456 kB
Inactive:  2832144 kB
Active(anon):  4067692 kB
Inactive(anon):  1478636 kB
Active(file):  1853764 kB
Inactive(file):  1353508 kB
Unevictable:  0 kB
Mlocked:  0 kB
SwapTotal:  7812092 kB
SwapFree:  4857204 kB
Dirty:  244 kB
Writeback:  0 kB
AnonPages:  4529416 kB
Mapped:  158512 kB
Shmem:  465952 kB
Slab:  22377568 kB
SReclaimable:  21288156 kB
SUnreclaim:  1089412 kB
KernelStack:  9328 kB
PageTables:  37664 kB
NFS_Unstable:  0 kB
Bounce:  0 kB
WritebackTmp:  0 kB
CommitLimit:  24146032 kB
Committed_AS:  6939664 kB
VmallocTotal:  34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:  378860 kB
VmallocChunk:  34342245588 kB
HardwareCorrupted:  0 kB
AnonHugePages:  2568192 kB
HugePages_Total:  0
HugePages_Free:  0
HugePages_Rsvd:  0
HugePages_Surp:  0
Hugepagesize:  2048 kB
DirectMap4k:  146916 kB
DirectMap2M:  9181184 kB
DirectMap1G:  26214400 kB

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello,

I'm not seeing an issue with the output you provided. The following document explains the differences between "free" and "/proc/meminfo":

Interpreting /proc/meminfo and free output for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 and 7 - Red Hat Customer Portal

Could you let us know if this helps to explain the output you see?

Thank you.