clearing memory

[kaancho12]

hi,
we are using RH linux ES. when i looked up memory too much seems to be used:
[root@localhost home]# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1024888 936436 88452 0 250300 516012
-/+ buffers/cache: 170124 854764
Swap: 2040244 26608 2013636

Is there a way to clear this memory without restarting the server?
thanks ko12

 

[kaancho12]

let me explain the problem above more: we are serving pages and videos through the server. The videos are kept in another file server. the videos were loading fine till about two days ago then all this problem with server being slow came about. i have checked "top" and there doesnt seem to be any program taking major space. only thing i noticed was too much memory being occupied.
thanks
ko12

 

[thedaver]

The "free" command is often misunderstood.
The second line that begins "-/+ buffers" shows you the "real" free and used values for RAM consumption. This shows that 170MB of RAM is really used by programs, 854MB of RAM is really available.
The last figure on the first line shows that linux is using 516MB of RAM as cache since no applications are using that space.
This makes linux really cool in how it attempts to use as much RAM memory as it reasonably can.

My sense is that you need to look elsewhere for your problem. This is not a RAM issue, IMHO.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Silly question but has something else been added to the network that might be killing bandwidth?
If the video is being server slowly, it doesn't necessarily follow that the server is slow.


Trojan.

 

[kaancho12]

hi,
i would look into if something else has been added and what programs are running. thanks
ko

 

[zeland]

How do you describe this "slow"? Is the local handling/responce time on the server "slow" or just network connectivity to the server is "slow"? If it's the former, top should have some idications to what is going on. If it's the former, it could be a flaky NIC or switch on your network. Try analyzing with ethereal.


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