Insanely high RAM *buffers* usage following reboot/resize
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Data that munin is displaying is corroborated by the output of "free":
[user@host ~]$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 11967 9371 2595 0 7367 542
-/+ buffers/cache: 1462 10504
Swap: 255 0 255
Now, I'm well aware of the kernel's usage of unused memory for cache, but my understanding of buffers is that buffers are used to temporarily store writes until they've been committed to disk. Is that a correct understanding?
Now, three things (that I know of) changed during the migration.
1) We picked up the extra 4 cores that were given out earlier this week.
2) We're on the "Latest 64 bit" kernel, which is now 3.7.10-x86_64-linode30. Previously we were on 3.0.18 I believe.
3) We went from 4GB RAM to 12GB.
So…any thoughts about this? I can't make heads nor tails of it. This is a webserver, with very little disk IO (database is hosted elsewhere). I could see high buffer usage on a server with very high write IO, but I can't explain this in our case.~~
3 Replies
Network traffic hasn't changed significantly:
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I'm not an expert on its output, and I think it might not show how memory is used by the kernel, but, you know, it's a good tool for those that need more details into memory usage.