Tech Friday: Increased memory cheat on a smallish web server
Posted By RichC on January 15, 2021
Years ago when RAM was expensive, it was common to set up a SWAP space file for additional memory on computers and servers with plenty of fast hard drive space … especially when speed was not as important as preventing crashes. As applications get a little more demanding and server traffic increases,
memory use steadily rises .. and in my case is now often over 80% on this server. From past experiences I know it is only a matter of time again.
Since I’ve recently upgraded this server (should have added more memory), I’ve instead opted to use SWAP as I did years ago. So far so good. Here’s a comparison of two terminal screenshots of small servers running Linux 20.10 … the top running SWAP and the bottom (less used) without.
If you are struggling with memory issues and have optimized everything that needs to run on your server or computer, give SWAP a try.
Simply put, virtual memory is a combination of RAM and disk space that running processes can use. Swap space is the portion of virtual memory that is on the hard disk, used when RAM is full.
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