ram_available

Alerts
1

ram_available

OS: Linux, FreeBSD

This alarm shows the percentage of an estimated amount of RAM that is available for use in userspace processes without causing swapping. If this alarm gets raised it means that your system has low amount of available RAM memory, and it may affect the performance of running applications.

  • If there is no swap space available, the OOM Killer can start killing processes.

  • When a system runs out of RAM memory, it can store its inactive content in another storage’s partition (e.g. your main drive). The borrowed space is called swap or “swap space”.

  • The OOM Killer (Out of Memory Killer) is a process that the Linux Kernel uses when the system is critically low on RAM. As the name suggests, it has the duty to review all running processes and kill one or more of them in order to free up RAM memory and keep the system running.1


References and Sources

[1] Linux Out of Memory Killer

Troubleshooting section:

Check per-process RAM usage to find the top consumers
Linux

Use top:

root@netdata~ # top -b -o +%MEM | head -n 22

here, you can see which processes are the main RAM consumers on the %MEM column (it is calculated in percentage).

It would be helpful to close any of the main consumer processes, but Netdata strongly suggests knowing exactly what processes you are closing and being certain that they are not necessary.

FreeBSD

Use top:

root@netdata~ # top -b -o res | head -n 22

Here, you can see which processes are the main RAM consumers on the RES column (calculated in percentage).

It would be helpful to close any of the main consumer processes, but Netdata strongly suggests knowing exactly what processes you are closing and being certain that they are not necessary.