Summary
Possible causes of high RAM use in a Smoothwall system.
Problem
The Smoothwall is using large amounts of RAM; should I be worried?
Solution
Smoothwall products run on a Linux kernel that uses various techniques to optimize the system to run as fast as possible. Most of these optimizations involve memory.
One common way of increasing performance is to leave various configuration files, and so on, in a cache in memory. This memory will be reclaimed if and when it is needed by another process. It is not uncommon to see large amounts (over 80%) of memory being used by the system.
If swap space is being used, high values in the swap usage may indicate that the load on the server is greater than it is capable of handling. Therefore, high swap usage values may give an indication to the cause of "sluggish" or poor performance.