High Memory Utilization

[Atifah Abdul Latif]

Hi Broadcom Support,

I have few queries on memory management:

1. Apart from the admin dashboard, is there any other way to monitor memory usage? For example, if there is high usage of memory it will trigger an email/alerts to the admin.

2. If there is increasing utilization of memory, where can we clarify the logs to check if the usage is normal?

3. Do we have a workaround/KB to clean up a high memory utilization? I found this KB which recommend to have 64GB of RAM, however customer RAM is 15.59 GB and they are not plan to increase the size.

Thanks,
Atifah

[Joseph Fry]

Atifah,

Linux, and our virtual appliance is designed to use the memory you provide it... so its not uncommon to see that most of the memory is in use.  Even if you had 1TB of RAM, you would find the system using most of it eventually.  That said, if you have a large database, or a lot of sessions, more RAM may be necessary to have acceptable performance as it will increase how much data can be cached in memory, reducing disk access.

You can use SNMP to monitor system RAM once you enable it as described here: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/symantec-security-software/identity-security/privileged-access-manager/4-1-2/configuring-your-server/configure-network-settings/add-snmp-v3-users.html.  Just be sure that your only monitoring the "Available" memory (https://oidref.com/1.3.6.1.4.1.2021.4.6), not the "Free" memory.  It's been said many times that "Free" memory is wasted memory (https://haydenjames.io/free-vs-available-memory-in-linux/).

There is no way to "clean up" memory usage short of rebooting; the system will automatically optimize it's memory usage.

If you are seeing RAM usage increasing to the point of causing instability, you need to open a support ticket, as this would be indicative of a memory leak or other bug in the system.  These are rare, but can happen.

[Atifah Abdul Latif]

Thank you @Joseph Fry !