Report this

What is the reason for this report?

MySQL using 80% of my droplets RAM

Posted on June 24, 2016

I recently wrote a small web app in PHP that needs a database. So I chose MySQL with the idea that it would be efficient and not taking up any memory. My droplet has 1GB of RAM with 30GB of storage on Ubuntu 16.04. I started noticing the memory problem after I was getting warnings from APT trying to update my packages list (FATAL -> Failed to fork).

So then I ran ps -eo pmem,pcpu,vsize,pid,cmd | sort -k 1 -nr | head -2 to check what processes were using all the memory. Here is the output:

80.0  0.0 2611632 1236 /usr/sbin/mysqld
1.6  0.0 274288  1427 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

I can tell from here that MySQL is using 80% of the RAM on my droplet. Is there any way to make is more memory efficient so I don’t have to upgrade to more RAM on my droplet?

I am pretty new to being a sysadmin so I don’t know much about dealing with databases and such.

Thank you.



This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

This question was answered by @gndo:

@cmelone - those stats looks normal. The two other things to look for are swap (created and in use) and xmlrpc attacks. See the solutions provided from this previous question

View the original comment

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Get started for free

Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*

*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.