Date: Wed, 6 Oct 1999 12:39:06 +0100 (WEST) From: "TFC WLAN 97/98 - IST - ext.2269 (8418269)" <wlan@feldspato.ist.utl.pt> To: David Greenman <dg@root.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Inactive memory Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.05.9910061230140.1747-100000@feldspato.ist.utl.pt> In-Reply-To: <199910061006.DAA01900@implode.root.com>
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Thanks for the replies. I did manage to correlate 'slow system' to 'pine getblk' even when there's almost no CPU use... Sometimes it takes more than 10 seconds for Pine to open/close a big mailbox (more than 1000 messages), and during that time the systems respondes slowly... thanks, Joao Pagaime On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, David Greenman wrote: > >Is there a way to turn inactive memory into free memory in > >freeBSD 3.2. ? > > > >I have 512MB of RAM but a significant part (300MB) is only > >reported as free for a few hours after a reboot, > >then it becomes "inactive". > > > >I think that's why we have a slow system, specially with regard > >to Pine that takes for ever to close/open a large mailbox, because it > >spends a lot of time allocating memory (during that time the systems > >becomes very slow)... > > > >Here's the first lines of 'top': > > > >last pid: 50917; load averages: 0.03, 0.03, 0.00 up 1+21:35:32 > >10:46:50 > >94 processes: 1 running, 93 sleeping > >CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 0.0% interrupt, 100% > >idle > >Mem: 32M Active, 419M Inact, 26M Wired, 14M Cache, 8265K Buf, 11M Free > >Swap: 964M Total, 964M Free > > > > > >Any suggestions, hints ? > > Your system would be a lot slower without inactive memory. Basically what > that stat is telling you is that the system was able to use a large amount of > otherwise free memory for file caching, speeding up your applications > significantly. FreeBSD always tries to retain data that is useful; free pages > are just dead, useless pages that contain no useful data. The process of > moving pages from the various queues (inactive, cache, etc) to 'free' is > very fast and in most cases has almost zero overhead. In short, if your > system is slow when running 'pine', then it is for some other reason. > > -DG > > David Greenman > Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org > Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com > Pave the road of life with opportunities. > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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