Memory usage increased about 20% with 16.5

[trentm1@gmail.com]

That's my assumption, if Debian has nothing that needs the RAM, it will not touch filesystem cache consumption. It'll just sit there forever, until reboot. On reboot it won't recache things again... it basically starts over from scratch.

If you want to confirm this, next time you see it SSH into the box and run free -m the output of that command has a buff/cache column that reports how much memory is being used for filesystem caching. You can functionally consider all such RAM as available for use, because the OS will free it on demand when it needs it.

freemem.png

It does show 1524 in the buff/cache section.

[sky-knight]

And that's 1.5gb of RAM that will not show as "free". It's "used", but also easily made available when the OS needs it with 400mb still available for other things. That 1.7gb on the end is what's really "free", because it's available when needed.

In other words, that's a healthy box.

[balrog]

freemem.png

It does show 1524 in the buff/cache section.

You're okay. Linux Memory Management + swap objective (Linux not Untangle) is tricky: Anticipate application memory for use in the future. Linux here is basically saying an increase of memory usage in buff/cache is a "good thing(TM)" and put rarely used memory pages to swap. That's how it works even if you have large memory, and to repeat, don't disable swap not for OOM killer, but to counterintuitively speed up your untangle.

It's only an issue if the free and buff/cache is low and your swap is high. On your case, swap is a tad higher, but free/buff is high which is good overall.

[jcoehoorn]

Replying just to bookmark this thread. We get these "Low Memory" posts at least every other month, and this is one of the best examples so far where we have a clear demonstration of "No, this is how linux works now (and has since at least 2008)" that someone else could follow along to confirm their own box follows the same pattern.