Date: Fri, 05 May 2006 10:40:33 -0400
From: Michael Stone <mstone+postgres@mathom.us>
Subject: Re: Memory and/or cache issues?
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On Fri, May 05, 2006 at 10:27:10AM -0400, mcelroy, tim wrote:
>Sorry, been up all night and maybe provided too much information or not the
>right information and only confused folks, tired I guess.  When I say 'in
>use' I am referring to the 'used' column.

Which is a mostly irrelevant number. 

>Here's free from PROD001:
>[root@wbibsngwyprod001 kernel]# free -k -t
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>Mem:       7643536    6975772     667764          0     165496    5393396
>-/+ buffers/cache:    1416880    6226656
>Swap:      8185108       5208    8179900
>Total:    15828644    6980980    8847664

You've got 1.4G in use, 5.3G of disk cache, 165M of buffers and 667M 
free. That doesn't seem unreasonable. If an application needs more 
memory the amount of disk cache will decrease. As I said in an earlier 
email, the problem is that the application is trying to allocate a bogus 
amount of memory, not that you have a memory problem.

Mike Stone