When is it time for more RAM?

Node Man

Hi Everyone,
Basic server question (Im a network guy) : when is it time to upgrade a servers memory? I just replaced the 2gig in my Power Edge SC1425 with 8gig. It was really cheap and wonder when I should upgrade again.

NinjaBoy

When your server needs it

Seriously, I would say when you have on average 75% ram usage on your servers, it would then be time to look at upgrading again (or when you have the cash)

Snow.bros

When the applications on the machine start consuming a huge amount of your memory in a way that it starts affecting the performance of the server then you should consider upgrading your ram.

The usage looks good on that screenshot, what are you running on that server?

Node Man

Thanks guys. Essentially nothing is running on the server, CentOS 6 minimal, ftp, rsyslog, LAMP, NTP, DNS, that's about it. The server is apart of my cisco lab. I'll probably set up Nagios, and maybe a wiki and blog for personal use, and that's about it. Maybe down the road I'll format it and install Vsphere.

Snow.bros

Node Man wrote: »

Maybe down the road I'll format it and install Vsphere.

When you do you might want to upgrade your ram depending on how much ram you choose to assign your virtual machines and how many virtual machine you run there the virtual machines can eat your memory and your processor too.

Priston

In a production cluster I'd upgrade BEFORE you lose your redundancy. If there isn't enough memory in the cluster to take one server down to upgrade the memory, your too late.

UnixGuy

If it's your personal lab, then yeah whenever you feel like it. Like you said, RAM is cheap, why not have 32GB instead...you don't seem to need it though.

Deathmage

I would upgrade. My home computer has 64 GB's of RAM but I use Maya and 3DMAX and it literally eats it.

I would say upgrading once you don't have a buffer and the server/applications start to feel sluggish; if you want a quick solution reshape a hard drive or better yet if you have a un-used SSD make a SWAP partition and move your swap space to that. You'd be surprised how much more responsive a computer/server is if you simply move the swap file to a space that doesn't have fragmentation on it.

apr911

Based on your screen shot, you didnt even need the upgrade to 8Gigs. Your using 634 MB so you're probably good for a while with your 8 Gigs. If you were spec'ing out a new server I would say go for it and add more. My old server had 8Gigs of which I was using about 5Gigs, when I bought my new server I opted to go to 48GB because it was cheap, it was a number divisible by the number of threads (16), procs ( and dies (2) (not really important anymore but still a habit I have) and I planned to up my usage of the device adding many more VMs.

Im using about 2/3rd of that now, but I also have my VM's spec'd out to use more than I really need (most of my VM's are running in the 512MB range and Ive assigned 4GB to each VM so really I over spec'd but I have room to grow if I want or if I spin up a memory hungry VM. For example, my MSSQL box actually accounts for most of the usage with 12GB assigned to it. I plan to expand that soon since I have the memory available, I can afford to have my entire DB loaded into memory but as my DB is now 12GB Im swapping some data with memory reservations for the OS and other services so I plan on bumping it to 16GB soon, 2GB for additional data growth and 2GB for OS

GForce75

Don't forget to factor upgrading to an SSD. Makes a difference for file swaps and VM usage.