Taylor Lewick wrote:

When I pull up hobbit graphs for memory for one of our database servers with 16 GB of memory, I see the Actual Memory Used is reporting as 657 M and swap is 0 M Used.

But if I run ps -vax --sort -rss note the top 4 processes... Looks like just over 7.0 GB of memory is consumed.

I'm deleting PID, TTY and STAT colum to make sure it all fits on one line.

TIME MAJFL TRS DRS RSS %MEM COMMAND 12:39 4 3519 3310360 3193428 19.4 postgres: 4:22 0 3519 3312708 3077228 18.7 postgres: 0:31 0 3519 3312832 993816 6.0 postgres: 0:26 0 3519 3312128 192740 1.1 postgres:

Output of free shows... total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 16433348 16252424 180924 0 168500 15409800 -/+ buffers/cache: 674124 15759224 Swap: 8355832 540 8355292

So is the system telling me that most of the memory the processes are taking up from the ps -vax output is cached and can be released at any time?

That is also what I understand. "Actual" shows memory that cannot be released. This value is the one to watch.

Dominique