free memory question....?

[hurricanehrndz]

How much free memory is required for unraid to be able to share files?

 

I have an unraid system with 4gb of ram.

 

Right now I have sab, sick, and couch and other packages that are part of unmenu and it seems I only have 800 mb free after boot. Is 800 mb seem normal, I am thinking maybe I should upgrade to 16 so that I can run some vms...

 

If the system drops to 200mbs free it seems it can not share files efficiently enough, their is lots of buffering and dropped frames from xbmc.

 

Any input???

[BRiT]

Free memory is wasted memory. Linux by design will try to use all available memory for buffers or caches. When an application needs memory, Linux will drop some of it's buffers and caches to give your applications the memory it needs.

 

One other thing to point out is that unRAID runs off an in-memory ramdisk, so make sure your applications are not filling up the main root partition "/" as that will cause all kinds of issues.

 

To better understand memory, please post and examine the output of the following commands:

vmstat

free

df

 

It should look something like this, and notice how nearly all the memory is used for cache or buffer! However in your case, you need to also look at how much memory is being used by your applications to find the culprit that's likely leaking memory.

 

If you are going to run VMs, you should look into running ESXi as the host OS and run unRAID as a single VM inside there, then run the addons and other applications inside a different VM.

 

procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
1  0      0 3123044 330452 3805920    0    0    86   105   55   26  0  1 97  2

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       8176544    5053500    3123044          0     330452    3805920
-/+ buffers/cache:     917128    7259416
Swap:      8000364          0    8000364

[hurricanehrndz]

esxi seem like a good suggestion, but seems to me unraid is still some ways away from official support. I mostly run the virtual systems for testing os and doing study labs for certification programs.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10669.0

 

That is neat to know that linux is design to use all the ram possible, I was not aware.

 

Plus I think esxi is not an option for me as my motherboard does not support iommu. (880G)

 

Thanks for the heads, I'll pick up 16gb of ram since it's under 100$ and report back.

[Joe L.]

esxi seem like a good suggestion, but seems to me unraid is still some ways away from official support. I mostly run the virtual systems for testing os and doing study labs for certification programs.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10669.0

 

That is neat to know that linux is design to use all the ram possible, I was not aware.

 

Plus I think esxi is not an option for me as my motherboard does not support iommu. (880G)

 

Thanks for the heads, I'll pick up 16gb of ram since it's under 100$ and report back.

My original unRAID server has been running with 512 Meg of ram for over 5 years.  You do not need much unless you are running add-ons that use lot of ram.