Why 512MB Plan gives 498MB RAM ??

August 25, 2014 2.3k views
hunky
By:
hunky

Hello,

I am having a droplet running with the lowest plan.. It is suppose to give 512MB RAM but if I run free -m via SSH, it shows following data,

$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 498 414 83 0 9 97
-/+ buffers/cache: 308 190
Swap: 511 13 498

Why is it showing 498 MB ?? Since when I set 512MB Swap, it does show 512 (511 to be exact)

I am running CentOS 6.5 x86..

Is it normal or should I open a support ticket ??

Thanks..

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2 Answers
TonyTsang August 25, 2014

Try to run the following command

dmesg | grep "Memory"

You should see [Memory: xxx K/ yyy K available]
yyy is total memory available and xxx is total usable memory.
Some memory are reserved by kernel and free -m only show total usable memory managed by kernel, so you will see less memory than actual memory available.

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hunky August 25, 2014

thanks for the tip..

indeed it shows full 512MB there..

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