Hi,

I'm running PRTG, the latest Canary version. Thanks so much for the opportunity to run this for free - hopefully I can provide useful feedback.

I'm running it in an Amazon EC2 micro instance. Meaning that it only just has enough resources to chug along. This works well enough for me, as I don't need it to run fast but I do need it to be cheap. I've disabled all alerts on the local probe and this has worked fine up until now :)

However I'm now getting emails that don't look like any of the normal alerts,

Subject: "Warning: available RAM low on PRTG server computer!" Body: "WARNING!

The RAM available for PRTG is running low: only 292 MB are left. ..."

Is this a new safety thing? If so, can it be disabled?

Also, is this forum the right place for this? Or is there somewhere dedicated for the Canary/nighty builds?

Cheers, James

Article Comments

Hi James,
the alarm resp. email you are receiving is sent directly by the PRTG core not by any sensor. Also these warnings are implemented sincec PRTG 7. PRTG sends the same if only a certain amount of RAM is left which can be used by PRTG.
These warnings cannot be turned off as they are sent out when the stability of PRTG might be affected.
Best regards


Aug, 2013 - Permalink

Thanks for the reply.

Personally, for the reasons described above, I think it would be good to be able to customise or disable these alerts. Especially as I don't think that 292 MB is really a worryingly low amount of RAM. However I understand that my situation is probably somewhat in the minority.

Cheers James


Aug, 2013 - Permalink

Hi James,
I will bring this up at our next developer meeting but really cannot promise whether this will be changed or not, as for most users it is essential to know when the PRTG Core is about to run out of memory.


Aug, 2013 - Permalink

I don't know how many people are running PRTG on a virtual machine, but I suspect that there are plenty of us doing so. In these sorts of environments, the best VM performance is usually obtained by running the ship as tight and lean as possible--this means that we try to right-size RAM and processor resources to almost exactly the required level (at the machine's most busy time). Ironically, adding larger amounts of RAM to these VM's actually worsens their performance! The downside is that I get these spurious warnings from PRTG very frequently, even though the system is actually running very well, with solid performance. It sure would be great if there was something I could put in an .ini or .conf file that would tell PRTG that it is running on a VM, and so tight memory is an expected situation, and not something that needs to pop up every 5 minutes.


May, 2017 - Permalink

taftosterone, thank you very much for your KB-Post. Currently it's not possible to disable the low memory alerts in any way. Because with we want to ensure the most important thing for PRTG; that is stable monitoring. We've made a lot of experiences ourselves and with customer installations, that the dynamic memory allocation on VM side is not quick enough for PRTG in peak situations.
That mans the fixed limit was and is necessary for VMs just as well as on physical machines.


May, 2017 - Permalink