[CentOS] CentOS 3 vs. CentOS 4 Memory Utilization

[Johnny Hughes]

On Thu, 2007-02-08 at 22:33 -0500, hkclark at gmail.com wrote:
> I'm helping some folks who have a CentOS 3 i386 server with 512MB of
> RAM.  The output of 'free' looks like:
> 
> $ free
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        511428     497956      13472          0      29868     178280
> -/+ buffers/cache:     289808     221620
> Swap:      2040244     120644    1919600
> 
> The box does not even have X installed... it's basically a web
> application and email server.  They would like to upgrade to CentOS 4,
> but are concerned that it could be considerably more "memory hungry"
> and lead to memory starvation (they don't want to add more RAM to the
> box at this time, although that could be an option down the road).
> 
> I ran some tests under VMWare with fresh installations of CentOS 3 and
> CentOS 4 (both using a "minimal install", the same as the server in
> question) and CentOS 4 seemed to only use 10-25MB more memory.
> However, it's hard to know how this will translate into real-world
> performance over time and with the application installed.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience that would suggest how much more
> memory a non-X server like this might require?  If the application(s)
> on the server stay the same, do you think we would run into issues
> where memory would be depleted to a level that would cause concern?
> 

It should not be a problem as lots of your memory used is buffers and
cache.

CentOS-3 is going to be supported for a while yet (EOL is scheduled for
Oct 31, 2010), so if it is working perfectly and doing what they want,
they may want to keep it though.

If they upgrade or don't, the memory should be OK either way .
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20070208/8d22aabb/attachment.sig>