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Date:      Thu, 9 May 2002 09:14:47 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Tod McQuillin <devin@spamcop.net>
To:        MikeM <MyRaQ@mgm51.com>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Steadily increasing memory usage on a lightly loaded server
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.4.44.0205090906270.8544-100000@sysadmin>
In-Reply-To: <200205090919510568.03BA6562@sentry.24cl.com>

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On Thu, 9 May 2002, MikeM wrote:

> I'm running a web server that is lightly loaded, only about 15MB of
> bandwidth usage per day.  Ever since the recent kernel patches, I have
> been noticing that the memory usage is slowly, but surely, notching up.
> The server has about 700MB of memory.  About a day after a reboot, the
> top command shows all except for 40MB being used, but I do not see any
> process that is using it.

This is normal.  Free memory is wasted memory.

Your memory is being used to cache filesystem data.

See http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/index.html

also
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&threadm=7h4kj1%24rhg%241%40flea.best.net&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dactive%2Binactive%2Bqueue%2Bfreebsd%26hl%3Den%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg

and
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&threadm=66f328%24c03%241%40flea.best.net&rnum=5&prev=/groups%3Fq%3Dactive%2Binactive%2Bqueue%2Bfreebsd%26hl%3Den%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DN%26tab%3Dwg

> About three days after a reboot, swap starts to be used, albeit only a
> little swap.

This is good!  FreeBSD will actually proactively page stuff out to swap,
anticipating a memory shortfall, so that when a shortfall happens, it can
just ditch the pages it already swapped out without having to waste time
with I/O.
-- 
Tod McQuillin



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