Memory Low on VPS

Question

I have a VPS account that has been having memory issues. It's running a handful of WordPress sites, but they are all low traffic. For all sites combined, the server only gets about 500 visitors a day. This is causing the databases to stop responding and the sites to go down.

The "top" command cannot be found, but I did run the following command to get what details I could. The server was restarted last night.

[root@vps2096 bin]# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        1048576 kB
MemFree:            9584 kB
Cached:           122252 kB
Buffers:               0 kB
Active:           552524 kB
Inactive:         454528 kB
Active(anon):     488708 kB
Inactive(anon):   396092 kB
Active(file):      63816 kB
Inactive(file):    58436 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:             0 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Dirty:                 0 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:        884800 kB
Shmem:              3820 kB
Slab:              31924 kB
SReclaimable:      13764 kB
SUnreclaim:        18160 kB

It seems like 1gig of RAM should be more than capable of running a few sites. I'm running Linux version 2.6.32-042stab084.17 with Plesk, not Cpanel.

It seems like the AnonPages number is high, but I don't know what that is.

Is there any way to find out what is eating my memory without using top? Will installing W3 Total Cache on the WP sites help at all? Any other suggestions?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Install htop on your server:

sudo apt-get install htop