I have installed Ubuntu 14.10 on a server. The server main task is running a MongoDB installation along with several NodeJS applications. The NodeJS applications will run continuously and will accept requests from outside.
Every now and then large requests will come in causing some NodeJS application to use a lot of RAM for a short amount of time. I have been trying to monitor this but am not sure what to make of my findings.
So far I have used two commands to get insights in the RAM usage. These are
free -m
and
sudo htop
The first shows this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3442 3158 283 6 111 1203
-/+ buffers/cache: 1842 1599
Swap: 0 0 0
When I look at this I would say that about 280MB of RAM is free. Which does not seem like a lot.
htop tells me the following:
1 [||| 0.8%] Tasks: 61, 129 thr; 2 running
2 [||| 1.0%] Load average: 1.16 1.15 0.93
Mem[|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||1979/3442MB] Uptime: 29 days, 00:23:31
Swp[ 0/0MB]
I don't really now how to read this. Can anyone help me out here?
I guess my question in the end boils down to these:
- How can I get some insight in how much RAM is available?
- When is the RAM memory too little? Is 300MB considered very little? Dangerously so?