Q: How do I know how much Guaranteed RAM my VPS has?
A: The simple answer is to jut type free -m from a command prompt and you will see something like the output below.

            total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        512         189        322      0         0           0

The values shown above are in Megabytes so this VPS has 512M of RAM and is using 189M which leaves 322M free.

If you are a bean counter then you can calculate it by typing ‘cat /proc/user_beancounters’ and taking a look at vmguarpages, oomguarpages, and privvmpages in the ‘barrier’ and ‘limit’ columns. If your vmguarpages shows 131072 in the limit column you can do the formula: vmguarpages * 4 /1024 where pages = 4KB and a Megabyte = 1024 KBs.

131072 * 4 /1024 = 512

If you would like to know what your “burstable” RAM just do the same formula but use the privvmpages number in the barrier column. If the barrier for privvmpages is 163840 (i.e. 163840 * 4 / 1024 = 640)

To save you some math some common values are provided below.

32768 = 128M
65536 = 256M
98304 = 384M
131072 = 512M
163840 = 640M
196608 = 768M
262144 = 1024M (1 GB)

We’ll discuss the oomguarpages setting in a later post.

vpsgreen.com is pleased to announce the addition of two new Dell servers in the Denver location. New accounts will established primarily on server01 with additional capacity and database services being provided on server02. We have also moved our primary corporate site to these same servers and will be making enhancements in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the news sections.