Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 16:34:27 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> To: Tod McQuillin <devin@spamcop.net> Cc: MikeM <MyRaQ@mgm51.com>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Steadily increasing memory usage on a lightly loaded server Message-ID: <20020509143427.GA28486@student.uu.se> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.44.0205090915220.8544-100000@sysadmin> References: <20020509140719.GA28169@student.uu.se> <Pine.GSO.4.44.0205090915220.8544-100000@sysadmin>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 09:19:39AM -0500, Tod McQuillin wrote: > On Thu, 9 May 2002, Erik Trulsson wrote: > > > The memory that is marked as 'Inactive' is also available for allocation > > just as the 'Free' memory. In practice you can just add together the > > 'Inactive' and the 'Free' memory to get the total of free memory. > > Not quite -- if I understand it correctly, 'Inactive' is still part of a > running process's address space (or buffer cache) but has not had it's > page-used bit turned on since the last time it was cleared. > > > The 'Inactive' memory contains data that *can* be reused (such as the > > code for programs that has recently been run) but that can also be > > thrown away without further notice if necessary. > > I think you are thinking of 'Cache', not 'Inactive'. Pages in the > inactive queue are still dirty, so they must be paged out before they can > be reused. 'Cache' pages are clean, so they can be reused at any time. > > See http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/x78.html > for details. It seems you are right, and my understanding of which was which of the 'Inactive', 'Cached' and 'Buf' categories was not quite correct. My main point still stands though in that having lots of memory moved from 'Free' to 'Inactive' is normal and nothing to worry about. -- <Insert your favourite quote here.> Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020509143427.GA28486>