get server ram with php

Small and tidy function to get all of its values associated to their keys.

$contents = file_get_contents('/proc/meminfo');
preg_match_all('/(\w+):\s+(\d+)\s/', $contents, $matches);
$info = array_combine($matches[1], $matches[2]);

// $info['MemTotal'] = "2047442"

If you know this code will only be running under Linux, you can use the special /proc/meminfo file to get information about the system's virtual memory subsystem. The file has a form like this:

MemTotal:       255908 kB
MemFree:         69936 kB
Buffers:         15812 kB
Cached:         115124 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:          92700 kB
Inactive:        63792 kB
...

That first line, MemTotal: ..., contains the amount of physical RAM in the machine, minus the space reserved by the kernel for its own use. It's the best way I know of to get a simple report of the usable memory on a Linux system. You should be able to extract it via something like the following code:

<?php
  $fh = fopen('/proc/meminfo','r');
  $mem = 0;
  while ($line = fgets($fh)) {
    $pieces = array();
    if (preg_match('/^MemTotal:\s+(\d+)\skB$/', $line, $pieces)) {
      $mem = $pieces[1];
      break;
    }
  }
  fclose($fh);

  echo "$mem kB RAM found"; ?>

(Please note: this code may require some tweaking for your environment.)

Using /proc/meminfo and getting everything into an array is simple:

<?php

function getSystemMemInfo() 
{       
    $data = explode("\n", file_get_contents("/proc/meminfo"));
    $meminfo = array();
    foreach ($data as $line) {
        list($key, $val) = explode(":", $line);
        $meminfo[$key] = trim($val);
    }
    return $meminfo;
}

?>

var_dump( getSystemMemInfo() );

array(43) {
  ["MemTotal"]=>
  string(10) "2060700 kB"
  ["MemFree"]=>
  string(9) "277344 kB"
  ["Buffers"]=>
  string(8) "92200 kB"
  ["Cached"]=>
  string(9) "650544 kB"
  ["SwapCached"]=>
  string(8) "73592 kB"
  ["Active"]=>
  string(9) "995988 kB"
  ...

Linux commands can be run using the exec function in PHP. This is efficient and will do the job(if objective is to get the memory).

Try the following code:

<?php
  exec("free -mtl", $output);
  print_r($output);
?>