Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 13 Jul 2000 09:38:05 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To:        Glenn McCalley <freebsd@mail.bnetmd.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: what is soaking up memory?
Message-ID:  <20000713093805.A20695@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007130756380.91958-100000@mail.bnetmd.net>; from "Glenn McCalley" on Thu Jul 13 08:05:16 GMT 2000
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0007130756380.91958-100000@mail.bnetmd.net>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In the last episode (Jul 13), Glenn McCalley said:
> 2.2.8 system, 192MB, runs fine -- but... after uptime of 12 hours or
> so free memory (shown by top, not exact I know but should be close?)
> has fallen to 5MB or so.  Usage is shown as about 125MB Active with
> about 25MB each Wired and Cache.  We just added 64MB to bring it to
> the 192MB and it was soaked up overnight.
> 
> Stopping apache, raven and minivend (only things running to speak of)
> only frees about 15MB, so what's got the other 180MB or so?  ps
> doesn't show anything odd running, and interestingly the % memory
> used by task shown in ps only totals to about 32%.

Free memory is wasted memory.  The RAM that your programs don't
actively allocate is used by FreeBSD as disk cache.  Inact, Cache, and
Buf are all cached data at different aging levels.  You actually want
as little Free memory as possible.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20000713093805.A20695>