Find unnecessary service/file and remove it from the server to free up the disk space and RAM

March 24, 2015 3.1k views
Linux Basics LAMP Stack
gidonyou
By:
gidonyou

Hello, I am newbie at VPN server, so please forgive knowledge I have.
I was playing around with the server installing services to try out different stuff, however I found out I am running 79 total tasks, with high usuage of ram (512mb total). 

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        501820     463096      38724      13440      18244     294528

I have installed LAMP kit then installed phpmyadmin and .htaccess which is all I need. Is there anyway to freeup and delete services/(config)files I don't need? Thankyou

3 comments
  • ryanpq MOD March 24, 2015

    This depends on how you installed them. If you use aptitude instead of apt-get to install packages you can roll back and ensure any dependencies that were installed for a package are removed as well as the package itself.

    If you are using apt-get you may not be able to remove all the dependencies that were installed but you can remove packages you installed (and any files they own) with:

    apt-get purge packagename
  • gidonyou March 24, 2015

    Thanks for a quick reply. How do you find the services I installed?

  • gidonyou March 24, 2015

    http://pastebin.com/QAVCtad3
    This is the list of packages I have in my server. Can somebody tell what I can get rid-of?

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1 Answer
Viko March 24, 2015

A decade ago RAM was crucial. People tended to do more and more with things with their computers and each new task required additional RAM. Back in this days memory was really expensive and came in small amounts.

Nowadays, when memory is cheap and accessible, the Operating system assumes that you have plenty of it. So the OS will cache files in the RAM, as this improves speed and performance. It is better to have some applications cached/buffered instead of keeping the RAM free and unused. If your system requires more RAM to operate properly, the Linux kernel will remove the unneeded cache/buffers, which it has created.

My personal opinion is that your RAM consumption is normal.

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