February 5, 20242 yr Hi there! I have recently upgraded my RAM, and I don't think it is being utilized fully. System details: UNRAID OS Version: 6.11.5 RAM: 16GB (previously 4GB) I have been using this box for ~6 months. I noticed my RAM was always full, and some docker apps were periodically crashing. When I looked at the logs, I saw out of memory errors, so I bought and installed more RAM. While my dashboard now shows 16GiB of RAM after the upgrader, it also always shows utilization pinged at 25% - the same amount of RAM as was previously installed. When I run "free -h" I get this output: total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15Gi 2.5Gi 274Mi 1.0Gi 12Gi 11Gi Swap: 0B 0B 0B Not sure if this copy/paste will format correctly, but basically, it seems that only 4GiB is allocated to be used as RAM and shared VRAM, with 12GiB allocated to buff/cache. Side note, I assume this is in my BIOS, but I don't even use the intel integrated graphics, its headless, so I should probably reduce the shared RAM to minimum. My limited research seems to imply that there is a linux kernel setting to change these allocations. I haven't been able to find out how to tweak this, and wonder if BIOS settings come into play, aside from the VRAM. I did not update my BIOS settings after installing the new RAM. 1) Is there any way to change the allocation to "buff/cache"? 2) Is this normal and I'm just being a ding dong? 3) Is there a way to 'stress test' the RAM usage - ie run a docker that uses 8GiB of RAM, and see if the kernel allocates the RAM to this process? Thanks all! Edited February 5, 20242 yr by lolden clarification
February 5, 20242 yr Community Expert Some of the RAM (12GiB) is being used for cache, this is normal with Linux, if more RAM is needed it will use from there, that's why it shows 11GiB as available
February 14, 20242 yr Author Thanks for your reply JorgeB. I've read this as well. I think you are almost certainly correct, and it's just a coincidence that i always see 25% RAM usage. Still, it seem so odd to me that it is using exactly that much so consistently. I guess I wonder, is there any way to run an application that would say, just use 6GiB of RAM? It would assuage my concerns haha. There must be some program like this I could find, do you have any idea? I will look for one and post if I find one.
February 15, 20242 yr 6 hours ago, lolden said: I think you are almost certainly correct, and it's just a coincidence that i always see 25% RAM usage. Still, it seem so odd to me that it is using exactly that much so consistently. I don't think it's a percentage of your RAM exactly. Although I have a lot more available, it seems the shared and cache are quite similar. I am also headless, but with two Nvidia cards installed, so you'd expect your shared RAM to be more than me if it were using a chunk of yours for onboard. I mean, it can't hurt to try turn back your onboard allocation and see if it makes a difference. Playing is learning! total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 94Gi 2.3Gi 80Gi 1.3Gi 11Gi 89Gi Swap: 0B 0B 0B
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