From owner-freebsd-stable Thu May 9 7:15: 2 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from sysadmin.chi.ubsw.com (sysadmin.chi.ubswarburg.com [146.180.1.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3FB2837B40C for ; Thu, 9 May 2002 07:14:55 -0700 (PDT) Received: from devin by sysadmin.chi.ubsw.com with local (Exim 3.12 #2) id 175ogy-0002NR-00; Thu, 09 May 2002 09:14:48 -0500 Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 09:14:47 -0500 (CDT) From: Tod McQuillin X-X-Sender: devin@sysadmin To: MikeM Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Steadily increasing memory usage on a lightly loaded server In-Reply-To: <200205090919510568.03BA6562@sentry.24cl.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message