How to utilize full ram memory

Question

Im using Intel® Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 0 @ 2.70GHz × 18 processor

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        128899      15893     113006         24        163      12691
-/+ buffers/cache:       3038     125860
Swap:       131028          0     131028 

I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, 64-bit system. My system is using only 3% of its ram memory (125.9 Gib). Can anyone tell me why my system is not utilizing its full ram memory and how can I use it?

Answer 1

My car has 1000 seats in it but we only use two, how can I fill up the other 998 empty seats?

RAM is used as it's required by applications on the system. If you want to use more of it, run applications that use more RAM. Or run more instances of the ones you currently do. That's the point of having more RAM. You can run bigger and more.

You essentially have a supercomputer. Do supercomputery things with it.

• Virtualise out, so it presents as a number of virtual servers for smaller tasks. VMWare, Xen, etc. You lose an overhead for each node but it's easier to separate tasks out to discrete amounts of resource.

• Run large computational problems.

• Run a service that allows other people to run their computational problems.

But essentially you're looking at this the wrong way. If you have to ask what you're going to do with this machine, it's probably the wrong machine for the job. Sell it and buy a server more suitable for the things you want to do.