Hey guys... I've been tweaking my 512 here and there to try to get the best performance for what I am working with.

Whats the best way to see if I am using to much memory or to its resulting in swap usage? I pasted a few things below... I noticed when checking the vmstat there is some swap usage, but why would there be when there seemed to be some free memory (in cache), this is what gets dumped first if there is need for memory correct?

Is there anything else I should be monitoring to see if I'm using swap? (If you have time, based on what you see below, do I have enough free memory to allow mysql a bit more memory room ?)

Thanks for the help in advance, just need some better clarification on what exactly I should be watching.

free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           497        487          9          0          7        254
-/+ buffers/cache:        226        270
Swap:         1023         86        937

vmstat 1 20

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 0  0  84616  36668   7272 254396    3    2     8     7   12   10  2  1 97  0
 0  0  84616  36668   7276 254420    0    0     8     0  382  116  0  0 99  0
 0  0  84600  40896   7276 254424    0    0     0     0  219   50  0  0 100  0
 0  0  84600  41392   7280 254420    0    0    16    48  639  168  1  0 98  1
 0  0  84600  41384   7288 254432    0    0     0   152  647  211  0  1 92  6
 2  0  84536  35208   7288 254452  112    0   192     0 1836  885  5  2 91  2
 1  1  84456  32960   7336 255260  108    0   744   180 1746  655  4  2 89  5
 0  0  84448  33332   7336 255364   12    0   144     0 1024  558  1  1 97  1
 0  0  84448  33580   7344 255304   32    0    40   356  588  211  1  0 99  0
 0  0  84392  38060   7344 255336    4    0     4    20  530  171  0  0 99  0
 0  0  84328  37952   7344 255448   64    0   112     0 1210  523  3  1 95  0
 0  0  84328  37952   7344 255448    0    0     0     0   84   23  0  0 100  0
 0  0  84328  44780   7344 255448    0    0     0     0  111   23  0  0 100  0
 1  0  84328  50484   7348 255444    0    0     0   428  166   45  0  0 100  0
 1  0  84264  45340   7348 255480   36    0    36    40 1252  481  2  1 96  0
 1  0  84264  47448   7348 255516    0    0     0     0  607  250  2  0 98  0
 0  0  84264  47448   7348 255520    0    0     0     0  345  157  0  0 99  0
 0  0  84264  47324   7348 255520    0    0     0     0  654  274  3  1 97  0
 1  0  84264  42364   7348 255544    0    0    28    20  744  249  3  1 96  0
 0  0  84264  47936   7356 255584    0    0    32   132 1111  239  1  1 94  4

top

top - 12:02:05 up 2 days, 14:09,  1 user,  load average: 0.03, 0.12, 0.13
Tasks: 136 total,   1 running, 135 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.7%us,  0.6%sy,  0.0%ni, 97.2%id,  0.4%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    509084k total,   452264k used,    56820k free,     7544k buffers
Swap:  1048572k total,    83292k used,   965280k free,   258640k cached

_________________
Thanks,
- John

Install munin it generates graphs for just about anything you want so you can see your resource usage over time.

Regarding swap, swap is good, swapping is bad. Swap takes things that aren't used a lot out of memory freeing it up for something useful. Swapping is when things go in and out of swap, this is bade since it's slow and if you're swapping a lot your server will crawl and die. Munin can show your swap in/out per day,week and month if you see it starting to spike then you need to look into why.

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Thanks for the rely.

I understand that swapping is bad. I'll check out munin as well. Is there anything else I should monitor to see if things are using swap?

_________________
Thanks,

- John

Over time you should be using Cacti and for alerts nagios.

_________________
Larry Ludwig
Empowering Media
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