The short answer is, of course, “no.” 🙂 1
A common mistake that Linux users make — indeed, one that even some less experienced Linux sysadmins sometimes make — is treating Linux2 as if memory technology hadn’t evolved since MS-DOS, when you needed as much memory as possible — especially conventional RAM (anyone remember that?) — to be free, so that applications could be loaded into it and run. If there wasn’t enough free memory, then applications wouldn’t run, or would run worse, so you’d have to “optimize” your DOS system to have as much free conventional memory as possible (using tricks such as loading device drivers into upper memory, and, of course, exiting a program completely before starting another.)
Somehow, that line of thinking still exists — even, apparently, in people who never used MS-DOS or similar systems before(!). “Free memory is good,” people think. “If most of the RAM is used up, then there’s a problem,” they insist — one to be solved either by killing applications or by adding more memory to the system.
Linux — like all modern systems, and I’ll even include Windows here 🙂 3, uses virtual memory. Put simply (and, yes, I’m simplifying it a lot — there’s more to it, of course), it means that the amount of available memory is actually (mostly) independent of the physical system RAM, since the system uses the disk as memory, too. Since real RAM is (virtually) always faster — but (usually) smaller — than a disk drive, the system typically uses prefers to use it for more critical stuff (such as the kernel, device drivers, and currently actively running code), with less critical stuff (say, a program waiting for something to happen) being relegated to the disk — even though it’s still “memory”. Note that even most of the aforementioned “critical stuff” can be temporarily moved to the disk if needed.
You may now be asking: if RAM is typically preferred for “critical stuff” only, and that stuff doesn’t take up the entire available memory, then what’s the rest of the RAM used for? The answer is, of course, disk caching — both for reading (loading up recently and/or frequently accessed data from the disk and keeping it available in RAM for a while, in case it’s needed again in the future) and for writing (which works the other way around — the system tells the program the data is already written to disk, so that it can go on instead of waiting for it, but it’s still only in memory, to be written a short while later.) So, any free RAM is typically used for disk caching, with the system managing it automatically.
But people keep looking at the output of “top”, seeing 90% of the physical RAM used, and panicking. 🙂
In fact, this confusion was so common that modern Linux systems even changed some labels on the “top” command. For instance, this is from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x:
As seen above, the server has (rounding down) 567 GB of physical RAM, of which 506 GB — i.e. 89% — are used. Looks scary (if you haven’t been reading so far), right? I mean, the server is at almost 90% capacity! But then you look at the value for “cached”, in the line below. That’s 479 GB — or 84% — used for disk cache! In other words, the entire operating system and applications are running in just 5% of the server’s RAM, with the rest of it being used just to make disk access faster.
And that “cached” value — and this is the important bit — counts as free memory. It’s available to the system whenever needs it. In “computer terms”, it’s not technically free, it’s being used for the cache, but in “human terms”, it’s just as free as the one that actually says “free” in front of it.
As I said above, this caused so much confusion to users (for decades) that, eventually, it was changed. Here’s how it looks like in a RHEL 7.x system:
In the first line: 79044 KB free + 240444 KB used + 697064 KB for buffers and cache (which were separated in the old version, by the way) = …Â 1016512 KB, which you’ll note is exactly the first value in the same line, for total physical memory.
In the second line, the first three values refer to swap, so they’re not relevant here, but the “avail Mem” one is new. What is it? According to the “top” manual page,
The avail number on line 2 is an estimation of physical memory available for starting new applications, without swapping. Unlike the free field, it attempts to account for readily reclaimable page cache and memory slabs.
In other words (and this is again an oversimplification), it’s what the system has readily available — in other words, the “free” part, plus (most of) what is being used for caching. That doesn’t mean it can only use that much memory, it just means that that’s what it can use right now, without swapping anything out. Which, in my opinion, ends up not mattering that much, in terms of a precise value. However, at least it now gives a better (though rough) idea of what part of the physical memory is available, not simply “free” (i.e. not doing anything).
So, what about those specific cases mentioned (in a note) at the beginning? Well, if there is very little memory free and very little swap space free and very little memory (compared to the total amount of physical memory) is being used for buffers/cache, then and only then4 may it be the case that the server actually needs more memory and/or swap space, or that some process has some kind of memory leak or is otherwise using much more memory than usual (if restarting the service fixes it, then this is probably the case.)