Why 512MB Plan gives 498MB RAM ??

Posted on August 25, 2014

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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Tony Tsang

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.