Running Low on Free Memory

[Trevor]

My system is running low on free memory!  I would create some swap space, but I don't have any available hard drive space - internal or external!!!

My hardware won't accommodate any additional RAM.

Is there any Linux solution to help me overcome this matter, or am I just going to have to start looking to see who has compute devices on sale?

Note:  Cutting back on the items, that are currently taxing my memory, is NOT an option!!!!

[Blue_bird]

how about clearing the system swap manually..!

isn't it right solution ?

[Trevor]

Won't I have to continue doing this occasionally?

[Waldirio]

Hello @Trevor 

When you say "I would create some swap space, but I don't have any available hard drive space - internal or external!!!", without your "df -a", we can't say if indeed you don't have any space, but you could also add an external usb stick, or external HD and create your swap over there.

Another point, your BaseOS should be able to handle the memory usage, you can double-check if you have cache in use, if yes, fear not, your system should be able to release the cache, once you start loading something that you really need to load in memory.

I hope this helps!

[Trevor]

Hello Waldirio, that's just it - I all ports that can accomodate anything external are occupied!
Max capacity!!!

Nevertheless, many thanks for the suggestion!!!

[Chetan_Tiwary_]

@Trevor well I think you need to tune your vm.swapiness parameter and if require  free pagecache, dentries, and inodes :  /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

you can tune this to 1,2 or 3 depending upon your case but be alerted that it may cause perfoemance issues.

Given that the kernel is designed to automatically free up memory from its caches as needed, persistent out-of-memory problems indicate an underlying memory leak, which won't be resolved by simply clearing the caches.

[Trevor]

Guess I'll need to begin the investigation of a memory leak.

Many thanks Chetan!!!