Why is RAM usage so high on an idle server? [duplicate]

Posted by DeeDee on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by DeeDee
Published on 2013-11-01T18:45:40Z Indexed on 2013/11/01 21:57 UTC
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memory-usage

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rhel6

This question already has an answer here:

Why is Linux reporting “free” memory strangely? 2 answers

I'm investigating a server used for scientific data analysis. It's running RHEL 6.4 It has almost 200GB of RAM. It's been running very slowly for users via SSH, and after some poking around I quickly noticed that the RAM usage was sky-high. What's odd is that even in an idle state it's still using a ton of RAM:

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I also looked via htop and I can't see that any running process is using more than 0.1% of the RAM. So I wonder what's going on? Right now the only user-initiated process running is an rsync between two NFS-mounted shares.

I tried rebooting the server and it was much more responsive for a few minutes, but then memory usage shot up again.

Is there any way I can pinpoint why memory usage is so high?

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