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This is a memory stats from my VPS (OpenVZ). 

$ free -m
         total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       800        405        394          0          0        405
-/+ buffers/cache:      0        800
Swap:        0          0          0

It hosts PHP stack (nginx, Apache, mod_php) + some Python apps via uWSGI, so machine is not idle anyway. Can anyone explain, why only cached memory is shown and buffers are always 0 (possibly, virtualization issue)? And what does buffers and cached memory values exactly mean?

PS: I've seen similar questions like this, but they don't make it more clear...

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oxfn
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1 Answers1

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OpenVZ does not let you see how physical memory not assigned to you is being used. It shows only the memory assigned to you and how much of it is assigned to processes you created.

You will frequently find that for this reason and many similar other reasons, it is recommend that important applications be kept a safe, and large, distance away from OpenVZ.

David Schwartz
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