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today I ran the command df on my CentOS 6 - MySQL/Sphinx database server linux machine (with 80GB of RAM).

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             50395844   1907988  45927856   4% /
tmpfs                 37105808         0  37105808   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1               495844     37092    433152   8% /boot
/dev/sda5              4080064     73736   3799072   2% /tmp
/dev/sda6            1093623528  77437372 960633288   8% /storage

I noticed a wopping 37GB of ram is allocated to a TMPFS drive named /dev/shm

This came as quite a shock, as it is 0% used.

My hoster must have set it up this way, but is this normal?

Am I really wasting half my RAM now, or is this RAM used by other programs?

Mr.Boon
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1 Answers1

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You are not wasting space. tmpfs has to be used before it will use RAM and paging space.

free -h will show you memory use in human readable units. If you were using tmpfs space, that would be under shared.

John Mahowald
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