Server runs out of RAM quickly but nothing unusual happening.

200MB left after only one hour...

Mem: 4150292k total, 3929236k used, 221056k free, 281184k buffers
Swap: 2031608k total, 0k used, 2031608k free, 3204376k cached

Been having some problems with this server running out of memory. There are no unusal processes running, nothing showing up in the logs. I've been monitoring the server all day and over a few hours it slowly runs out of memory - it starts swapping like mad and falls over.

I've been running top and watching it with the highest memory usage at the top. There is no single process using a large amount of memory. I've compared this server to other servers and the performance of this is better than some - except they tend to stay with around 900MB available and can run like that for months. This one doesnt seem to be getting anything back once it has been used.

As I type this, the server has around 100MB remaining and I know it will soon fall over if I dont reboot it. As mentioned - there are no unusual processes running and all the normal ones are within the usual ranges of memory and CPU usage I'd expect to see. No process is using any more than 0.3 % of memory.

Could this be faulty RAM? The server has been fine for over a year but in the last two days it has fallen over 4 times.

Any ideas?

 

Hi Chirpy, thanks for your input. The server was showing very high swapfile usage and crashing with out of memory errors two or three times a day.

After re-installing almost everything I could think of and running a full file system check, the problem stopped. I put it down to a software-induced memory leak caused by some unknown circumstance. Possibly some minor disk corruption was a contributing factor.

All ok again... for now...

Thanks for your input guys