Idle server using 95% of RAM

Hello,

I recently leased a server from EV1. I added two domains to it and installed vBulletin on a subdomain.

These are brand new sites where I guarantee the only traffic to them is me.

In fact, I had some DNS problems that I eventually worked out until just a few minutes ago.

Yesterday,the server was using 25% of the RAM. Late last night, it was using 50% RAM. At noon today, Plesk 8.0 says it's using 95% of the RAM.

Should I be scared?

I can't imagine why the server would be using this much RAM.

I must admit that I know near-zero about server performance and such.

Thanks,
Brandon

 

List all current processes in the server & how memory they're each using, maybe a memory leak.

 

generally RAM is here to be used.
follow above recommendation - use your shell command

top

( if on Linux )

keep in mind that RAM also is used to cache frequently used pages by some processes to serve those files/pages faster without HDD access.

also
you never mentioned HOW MUCH RAM you have on your machine. I have 2GB for my site and hence there is plenty free at any time with lots of traffic. if your RAM is below 0.5 GB then much of it may be used by large SW

more important is CPU usage which normally should be rather low in the 1 digit% of a low traffic site like your new one.

if your data questionable - reboot your machine and see how it looks after rebooting

 

Seems apache and mysql optimization is needed. Plesk also consumes a fair amount of memory.

 

Okay, all of these things make sense.

It bugs/worries me that I'm possibly having memory leaks and require optization on a server that is brand new and had one unique visitor yesterday (me). I don't deny that optimization is a good idea. I'm just saying that if a server already needs optizimation when it has 0 load, than something is very wrong (maybe this is normal).

The server only has 512 MB of ram at the moment. We'll upgrade when the site goes live, for sure.


I guess a better question would go like this:
If you just leased a server from EV1 and it was using all of it's RAM without any traffic, would you be concerned?

Brandon

 

Yes, a server needs optimization at start...cause all ini files have default values! Now its vague and needs specially configured for 512MB or 1GB or whatever hardware you have...