Mongod resident memory usage low - mongodb

Question

I'm trying to debug some performance issues with a MongoDB configuration, and I noticed that the resident memory usage is sitting very low (around 25% of the system memory) despite the fact that there are occasionally large numbers of faults occurring. I'm surprised to see the usage so low given that MongoDB is so memory dependent.
Here's a snapshot of top sorted by memory usage. It can be seen that no other process is using an significant memory:
top - 21:00:47 up 136 days, 2:45, 1 user, load average: 1.35, 1.51, 0.83
Tasks: 62 total, 1 running, 61 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 13.7%us, 5.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 77.3%id, 0.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 1.0%si, 2.4%st
Mem: 1692600k total, 1676900k used, 15700k free, 12092k buffers
Swap: 917500k total, 54088k used, 863412k free, 1473148k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2461 mongodb 20 0 29.5g 564m 492m S 22.6 34.2 40947:09 mongod
20306 ubuntu 20 0 24864 7412 1712 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.76 bash
20157 root 20 0 73352 3576 2772 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.01 sshd
609 syslog 20 0 248m 3240 520 S 0.0 0.2 38:31.35 rsyslogd
20304 ubuntu 20 0 73352 1668 872 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 sshd
1 root 20 0 24312 1448 708 S 0.0 0.1 0:08.71 init
20442 ubuntu 20 0 17308 1232 944 R 0.0 0.1 0:00.54 top
I'd like to at least understand why the memory isn't being better utilized by the server, and ideally to learn how to optimize either the server config or queries to improve performance.
UPDATE:
It's fair that the memory usage looks high, which might lead to the conclusion it's another process. There's no other processes using any significant memory on the server; the memory appears to be consumed in the cache, but I'm not clear why that would be the case:
$free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1652 1602 50 0 14 1415
-/+ buffers/cache: 172 1480
Swap: 895 53 842
UPDATE:
You can see that the database is still page faulting:
insert query update delete getmore command flushes mapped vsize res faults locked db idx miss % qr|qw ar|aw netIn netOut conn set repl time
0 402 377 0 1167 446 0 24.2g 51.4g 3g 0 <redacted>:9.7% 0 0|0 1|0 217k 420k 457 mover PRI 03:58:43
10 295 323 0 961 592 0 24.2g 51.4g 3.01g 0 <redacted>:10.9% 0 14|0 1|1 228k 500k 485 mover PRI 03:58:44
10 240 220 0 698 342 0 24.2g 51.4g 3.02g 5 <redacted>:10.4% 0 0|0 0|0 164k 429k 478 mover PRI 03:58:45
25 449 359 0 981 479 0 24.2g 51.4g 3.02g 32 <redacted>:20.2% 0 0|0 0|0 237k 503k 479 mover PRI 03:58:46
18 469 337 0 958 466 0 24.2g 51.4g 3g 29 <redacted>:20.1% 0 0|0 0|0 223k 500k 490 mover PRI 03:58:47
9 306 238 1 759 325 0 24.2g 51.4g 2.99g 18 <redacted>:10.8% 0 6|0 1|0 154k 321k 495 mover PRI 03:58:48
6 301 236 1 765 325 0 24.2g 51.4g 2.99g 20 <redacted>:11.0% 0 0|0 0|0 156k 344k 501 mover PRI 03:58:49
11 397 318 0 995 395 0 24.2g 51.4g 2.98g 21 <redacted>:13.4% 0 0|0 0|0 198k 424k 507 mover PRI 03:58:50
10 544 428 0 1237 532 0 24.2g 51.4g 2.99g 13 <redacted>:15.4% 0 0|0 0|0 262k 571k 513 mover PRI 03:58:51
5 291 264 0 878 335 0 24.2g 51.4g 2.98g 11 <redacted>:9.8% 0 0|0 0|0 163k 330k 513 mover PRI 03:58:52

Answer 1

It appears this was being caused by a large amount of inactive memory on the server that wasn't be cleared for Mongo's use.
By looking at the result from:
cat /proc/meminfo
I could see a large amount of Inactive memory. Using this command as a sudo user:
free && sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches && echo "" && free
Freed up the inactive memory, and over the next 24 hours I was able to see the resident memory of my Mongo instance increasing to consume the rest of the memory available on the server.
Credit to the following blog post for it's instructions:
http://tinylan.com/index.php/article/how-to-clear-inactive-memory-in-linux

Answer 2

MongoDB only uses as much memory as it needs, so if all of the data and indexes that are in MongoDB can fit inside what it's currently using you won't be able to push that anymore.
If the data set is larger than memory, there are a couple of considerations:
Check MongoDB itself to see how much data it thinks its using by running mongostat and looking at resident-memory
Was MongoDB re/started recently? If it's cold then the data won't be in memory until it gets paged in (leading to more page faults initially that gradually settle). Check out the touch command for more information on "warming MongoDB up"
Check your read ahead settings. If your system read ahead is too high then MongoDB can't efficiently use the memory on the system. For MongoDB a good number to start with is a setting of 32 (that's 16 KB of read ahead assuming you have 512 byte blocks)

Answer 3

I had the same issue: Windows Server 2008 R2, 16 Gb RAM, Mongo 2.4.3. Mongo uses only 2 Gb of RAM and generates a lot of page faults. Queries are very slow. Disk is idle, memory is free. Found no other solution than upgrade to 2.6.5. It helped.