Red Hat

If the question had memory switching between 4GB or 10GB instead of 2GB and 10 GB, I'd say someone loaded a 32-bit kernel non-PAE kernel instead of a 32-bit PAE-enabled or 64-bit kernel.

IIRC, a standard 32-bit Linux kernel can use 4 GB and a 32-bit PAE-enabled Linux kernel can use 16 GB.

I don't know of anything in Linux that limits memory to 2 GB. Though there might be something in older versions.

I had something of this sort when upgrading an AIX server to latest TL (as it was then)

AIX is very good at keeping real memory full, so there's not much to see there. Paging space was not very full, but the server was only just grinding along.

New functionality was automatically included and the deamons used up the memory. We tracked them down with:-

Code:

ps -el|sort -bn +9

..... and then could deal with them. There was a change for them to use pinned memory, but for us, we just turned them off as they were unnecessary services.




Robin