Do I need more RAM?

[kitepilot at kitepilot.com]

Do I need more air?
Do I need more FOOD?
Do I need MORE BEER!!! 

Give more, MORE, MOOOREEEE!!!!
Gawd, I need more Prozac too...   :) 

You will never have too much memory, or extrapolating to aviation:
The only time I have too much fuel is when the airplane is on fire...  ;-) 

top alone will only hand you part of the picture.
Try:
free -t
Look at the line:
 -/+ buffers/cache: XXXX 

Memory is used by buffers that are there only for efficiency, but will be 
returned to the system on demand.  Sometimes very little used stuff will go 
to swap, and adding memory will not really help anything (and it won't hurt 
anything either, other than your checkbook) 

The "-/+ buffers/cache:" line will tell you how much memory the system is 
taking because nobody else is using it.
YMMV...
ET 

PS: And that "airplane on fire" wisdom is not always true, but works for 
novice pilots...
Or:
My job is not to teach how to fly.
My job is to help you stay alive while you learn...  :) 

 

 

Mark Phillips writes: 

> I have a Zope/Plone 2.5 web site running on Debian on a Linode virtual host.
> It has grown over the last few years, and now I need to add some more disk
> space. The site is for a school newspaper, so from August - June, students
> add news articles and photos. 
> 
> I was also looking at the output of top, and perhaps I need more RAM as
> well? Top shows I have only 5 MB free out of 368 MB of total RAM, but I am
> only using 9% of my swap, so perhaps I don't need more RAM. The site does
> not seem slow. 
> 
> Tasks:  69 total,   1 running,  68 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem:    368836k total,   363364k used,     5472k free,     8316k buffers
> Swap:   524280k total,    46716k used,   477564k free,    67436k cached 
> 
> Thanks for any suggestions you may have. 
> 
> Mark