[lug] server memory woes (3rd attempt!)

[Kevin Fenzi]

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>>>>> "Michael" == Michael Belanger <mrb at ciclops.org> writes:

Michael> Greetings everyone.  I have this new
Michael> email/dns/dhcpd/nfs/jabber
Michael> (WayToManyCriticalThingsForOneMachine) server that has 3 gigs
Michael> of RAM and dual AMD Opteron processors.

Michael> It stops responding to requests periodically (once a week or
Michael> so).  First, I suspected that the firewall was not allowing
Michael> AMANDA to do its thing (usually stops responding at night
Michael> during the backups), but it has still behaved the same --
Michael> even after opening up the firewall completely for the amanda
Michael> server.

Anything on the console or in the logs when it stops responding?

Michael> I have noticed that after a reboot it has approx 2.4 Gigs of
Michael> RAM available but goes down gradually to around 250 Megs
Michael> available by the next day.

Michael> I tried restarting the usual suspects like NFS and SAMBA, but
Michael> the RAM usage doesn't seem to recover.  Something is not
Michael> freeing up Memory.

How are you determining the amount of ram available... 
on a normal linux box the amount of memory "free" reported by "free"
should go down to a very small amount. Linux uses memory for caching
files, buffering and running applications. I think they should rename
that field "wasted". You want some around to handle new requests, but
you want as much as possible being used to make your box faster. ;) 

Michael> Other things I haven't tried restarting that could be
Michael> responsible are dhcpd, IMAP, and spamd.

Michael> Is there any way to effectively track that down or am I
Michael> doomed to reboot the server every day or so?

ps should tell you how much memory is being used by each process... 
try  'ps -auxww | less' 

Michael> The server is running Redhat 3.0 AS Release 3 x86_64 and is
Michael> up to date with all the redhat updates.  All applications --
Michael> except AMANDA and Jabber are just the Redhat Distro RPMs.

You might open a support ticket with RedHat. Since you paid for the
support, might as well use it. :) 

Michael> Thanks for helping!

kevin

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