Date: Wed, 27 May 1998 15:31:02 -0700 From: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> To: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How do I find out how much memory the kernel is using now? Message-ID: <27896.896308262@monkeys.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 27 May 1998 14:09:15 -0700. <Pine.BSF.3.96.980527140049.2179L-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
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In message <Pine.BSF.3.96.980527140049.2179L-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>, you wrote : >FreeBSD (and UNIces in general) don't use memory the same way MicroSlop >systems do. FreeBSD will allocate all of system RAM to itself, or as >much as it can use. RAM is first allocated to the kernel then to user >programs. Everything left over is allocted to a disk cache, aka buffer >cache, that is dynamically sized according to system RAM demands. Yes, i knew all that. I was discounting the disk buffer cache. When `stsctl -a' told me I only had about 3.8 MB of ``user memory'' that still didn't sound at all correct. (But maybe it was... see below.) >> P.S. I am still hoping for an answer to my original question... How can >> I tell exactly how much memory the OS itself is using at any given >> instant in time? > >Define `OS itself'. You mean the kernel only, kernel+devices, ... ? Yup. >Top tends to give you the best measure but you have to interpret it right. > >You should be paying attention to swap. My swap line from top: > >Swap: 100M Total, 41M Used, 59M Free, 41% Inuse > >tells me that I shold have added some more swap when I brought my 2gig >drive online. I've seen this up to 60% and that makes me really jumpy. OK. Thanks. Now I'm getting somewhere. This is the kind of guidance I was looking for. (I dunno why I didn't think to run top earlier. Duh.) The results from top on my system are interesting and rather misleading. Due to some goofy partitioning left over from another project, I have a HUGE 1.5 GB swap partition. Top shows that (on average) I am only using about 1% of that, which superficially sounds quite modest and OK, until I looked more closely and saw that the truth of that matter is that I'm constantly using about 18 MB of swap... mostly due to a single big process that I know is thrashing its actual working set a lot. So at last I have my answer. I need to put at least 18 MB more main memory into this machine in order to get it to stop behaving like a whashing machine with a unbalanced load set to the `spin' cycle. :-) I'll be doing that forthwith. Thanks for the help! -- Ron Guilmette, Roseville, California ---------- E-Scrub Technologies, Inc. -- Deadbolt(tm) Personal E-Mail Filter demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/deadbolt/ -- Wpoison (web harvester poisoning) - demo: http://www.e-scrub.com/wpoison/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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