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hey there, i have a question and may not be easy to answer, i really hope you can help me

i have a web server, with just one site hosted, this site is a joomla based website.

the problem is that after rebooting the system (webserver) i have almost 130mb of free ram, and after a few seconds i just have 20mb of free ram! how can be this possible?

the question is.. how can i test the ram usage in localhost? does exists any application able to tell me what's going on with my site?


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What kind of application are you running on the web server? It is possible that, upon initialization, a large amount of data is read in and cached. –  Eric J. Nov 6 '09 at 17:42
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 8 '09 at 4:03

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2 Answers

The fact the RAM is not free does not mean that it is not available for immediate use by the services or any other applications if they need it. As you can see in the output of the free command, a generous amount of RAM is used in the cache & buffers. If any application requires more memory, it will use an amount from the cache.

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What platform? Windows? Linux? Which web server? IIS? Apache? LightHTTPd?

The "Free" row in the Windows Task Manager under Physical Memory is deceptive. It should always be running close to zero, becuase it also contains the counter for pre-fetch. RAM is there to be used. If it's not being used for something it's being wasted.

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