Question
Why my CentOS droplet is eating all the RAM memory?
I started with a 2vCPU 2GB CentOS 7 x64 droplet installed from marketplace with a Plesk image. I have only create a Wordpress website with no more than 400 visits per month and followed the initial server setup for CentOS 7 on DigitalOcean.
Then I have started getting alerts from the DigitalOcean monitoring service because the droplet was using more than 70% of memory. I receive those mails 7 times per day, memory usage and resolved ones.
So I thought I was running out of memory, then I have purchased 2GB extra. So my droplet is now a 2vCPU 4GB. After 3 days, same as before, the alert emails for memory beyond 70% started to get my inbox.
At this particular moment, the server is upside that 70% of memory so I ran the command I know DigitalOcean uses to calculate memory (https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/monitoring/resources/glossary-of-terms/#memory)
cat /proc/meminfo
The results are:
MemTotal: 3880364 kB
MemFree: 287080 kB
MemAvailable: 2561780 kB
Buffers: 32 kB
Cached: 994716 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 1224116 kB
Inactive: 455532 kB
Active(anon): 769364 kB
Inactive(anon): 27284 kB
Active(file): 454752 kB
Inactive(file): 428248 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 16 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 684948 kB
Mapped: 101816 kB
Shmem: 111748 kB
Slab: 1750432 kB
SReclaimable: 1678876 kB
SUnreclaim: 71556 kB
KernelStack: 5552 kB
PageTables: 17372 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 1940180 kB
Committed_AS: 3978072 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 95708 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359537660 kB
HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB
AnonHugePages: 344064 kB
CmaTotal: 0 kB
CmaFree: 0 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
DirectMap4k: 98276 kB
DirectMap2M: 4096000 kB
DirectMap1G: 0 kB
The command free -m
results are:
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3789 935 240 109 2613 2464
Swap: 0 0 0
Plesk on the other side, trough Grafana is telling me that
memory:memory-used:value 858 Mb
memory:memory-cached:value 971 Mb
memory:memory-slab_recl:value 1.6 Gb
Any ideas? Anything that would help me understand this situation and solve it?
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.
×