As the title says my proxy is using all 4 gigs of ram, traffic is in the 5k+ range but it still shouldnt use 4 gigs. I have all the normal limits like hotlink protection, and I believe the config settings Im using are correct. 'max_file_size' => -1, 'allow_hotlinking' => 0, 'upon_hotlink' => 1, 'compress_output' => 0 What else can I do to bring RAM usage down?
What kind of server is this, apache? I would suggest tweaking the settings on the daemons to get them working better. What actual process is eating up the ram? The output from top should let us figure it out.
I would suggest talking to your server admin about tweaking the settings on the server to work better for you. Most server admins should have no problem getting the server in a decent shape, but the price will be determined by what kind of plan you have for support. I know that with the right server settings php based proxies can be tamed. I've been able to help someone get a decent size proxy run on a godaddy VPS. I know that if one can tame a proxy on a horrible VPS providers servers then I know it can be done with 4 gigs of ram on a dedicated server.
Without seeing a list of active processes in top it is hard to know what is going on. I assume that mySQL is eating most of the RAM. There are tons of settings to tweak to get this working better. The exact settings will vary server by server, but without the my.cnf file I couldn't really begin to tell you what to change. Apache could also be changed. The httpd.conf file has a ton of settings that can be optimized for various optimizations. Depending on what else is running on the server there are several other tweaks that could be preformed. For example spam assassin; that sucker eats through ram. There are some other daemons in cpanel that like to use a ton of ram that can be disabled in most cases. Without access to whats running its hard to give any actual things that should be changed.
If the proxies are not very established I would close the proxies and set up new ones. Or block file sharing sites.
BTW, linux memory usage is completely different...it may fill up 4GB caching recent files but not contributing to actual usage. Also upgrade to Apache 2.2.6 is worth considering.