The ammount of server ram free shown is slightly misleading, and slightly scary for someone who doesn’t use linix very much. It doesn’t account for disk cache (see http://www.linuxatemyram.com/) - could it be configured to show free memory accounting for this - or maybe both ?
And another weird thing - The ammount a memory used by my modded server setup is much higher than shown on my current hosted provider.
I created an un-managed profile and then copied the forger server files and mods from my current host - there they use 1.2-1.6 GB of ram, but under MineOS on Ubuntu it uses 1.8-2.1Gb of ram!
Are there some command line parameters or some other secrets my hosted provider might be using in order to keep memory usage down?
Try reducing the amount of RAM the server starts with. Usually that causes it to use less. If not then maybe your host uses SWAP (not recommended for a number of reasons, such as suffrage in speed even if it’s an SSD, and if it’s an HDD it will wear out much faster).
The extra RAM consumption may also be caused by the OS and other programs (unless you’re sure you’re reading only what the server uses).
I’m comparing usage against that shown in the host providers web panel, which may not be accurate
But this is interresting
On the 1Gb hosted service it runs at ~140% mem usage (naughty) which I took as 1.4Gb ram used
Running on my ubuntu server started from mineos with 2560Mb ram max it went straight to ~2000-2100 in use … a 50% increase!
But if I set max to 1024Mb (which my host probably has) then it runs at ~1300Mb (actually less)
So the answer is in the max (xmx) setting and my server probably does need the extra ram, although being told to use less we don’t actually notice any performance issues!