How to troubleshoot what eats memory?

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centos process memory memory-leaks meminfo
                          I'm trying to figure out why memory consumption started to constantly increase on my server during the last hours. I've tried to find the cause on the application level, but no success. That is why now looking into possible server cause. I'm not a pro in servers administration, so any help is appreciated. First common memory was eaten, now swap consumption is also constantly increasing.

My server runs on CentOS 7 with the kernel 3.10.0-514.26.2.el7.x86_64

**SOLUTION**  
Finally, the issue was identified to be caused by a recently updated server library. The accepted answer is a good reminder, in the situation when you're stressed out by the memory usage, to trace back what had been changed in your system before the issue appeared.  

Some tips I've been looking for and found to be very useful are described in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4999/how-to-find-which-processes-are-taking-all-the-memory 

I'm listing below the commands that I used and may help in such situation.

**ps auwx --sort rss** - processes sorted by memory usage

**ps -fu username** - processes by a user
   
**htop** usage/analysis showed many hung application cron-launched processes in my case. I configured htop to output both PID and PPID, because I needed to correlate **PPID** to **/var/log/cron** logged processes.  

**free -m**

        total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem: 7565        6525         440          47         599         657
    Swap: 8191        2612        5579


**cat /proc/meminfo**

    MemTotal:        7747260 kB
    MemFree:          253960 kB
    MemAvailable:     498904 kB
    Buffers:            6160 kB
    Cached:           189076 kB
    SwapCached:       467788 kB
    Active:          5572588 kB
    Inactive:        1258540 kB
    Active(anon):    5498664 kB
    Inactive(anon):  1185908 kB
    Active(file):      73924 kB
    Inactive(file):    72632 kB
    Unevictable:           0 kB
    Mlocked:               0 kB
    SwapTotal:       8388604 kB
    SwapFree:        5686452 kB
    Dirty:               104 kB
    Writeback:             0 kB
    AnonPages:       6168400 kB
    Mapped:            68668 kB
    Shmem:             48676 kB
    Slab:             456672 kB
    SReclaimable:     389064 kB
    SUnreclaim:        67608 kB
    KernelStack:        7232 kB
    PageTables:       106848 kB
    NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
    Bounce:                0 kB
    WritebackTmp:          0 kB
    CommitLimit:    12262232 kB
    Committed_AS:   10244216 kB
    VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
    VmallocUsed:       26276 kB
    VmallocChunk:   34359705340 kB
    HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
    AnonHugePages:   5191680 kB
    HugePages_Total:       0
    HugePages_Free:        0
    HugePages_Rsvd:        0
    HugePages_Surp:        0
    Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
    DirectMap4k:       83968 kB
    DirectMap2M:     8300544 kB
 

How can I proceed to find if there's any issue in how the server is functioning or configured in terms of memory usage?


                        
Asked by Y. E. (123 rep)
Jul 18, 2017, 10:10 PM
Last activity: Apr 29, 2019, 09:00 AM
How to troubleshoot what eats memory?

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