Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:28:34 -0600 From: "dap" <dap99@i-55.com> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Determining free memory on FreeBSD 4.8-REL Message-ID: <00bc01c3f278$5f6dbb10$6401a8c0@yourqqh4336axf>
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I know this question has been asked, but the answers I find tend to be along the lines of "Well, it's complicated." How do I determine if my FreeBSD is actually low on memory not? And what is Inact? I did read the manpages, but even they seem to skirt how I should view Inact vs. Free. (I did read the tuning manpage.) Let's say I have this: last pid: 23737; load averages: 0.21, 0.15, 0.27 up 5+20:43:14 15:22:31 231 processes: 1 running, 230 sleeping CPU states: 5.0% user, 0.0% nice, 2.7% system, 1.6% interrupt, 90.7% idle Mem: 76M Active, 25M Inact, 62M Wired, 2876K Cache, 35M Buf, 82M Free Swap: 496M Total, 41M Used, 456M Free, 8% Inuse So I have 82MB of free memory, 35MB of memory being used by the OS as disk IO, cache is different from Buf in some way or another (the top manpage doesn't quite go into details here). I don't quite get Inact and Wired. Why am I using 41MB of swap then if I have 82MB of free memory? On another box I have: last pid: 42029; load averages: 0.46, 0.38, 0.34 up 5+20:24:15 15:27:12 35 processes: 2 running, 33 sleeping CPU states: 1.0% user, 0.0% nice, 11.7% system, 6.1% interrupt, 81.3% idle Mem: 51M Active, 332M Inact, 97M Wired, 19M Cache, 61M Buf, 992K Free Swap: 1008M Total, 116K Used, 1008M Free 992K in Free but 332MB in Inact. So what is my conclusion here? That I have 332,992 KB free for use? Looking at vmstat I have no swapping going on: # vmstat 5 procs memory page disks faults cpu r b w avm fre flt re pi po fr sr ad0 ad4 in sy cs us sy id 3 0 0 189844 29624 80 0 0 0 442 375 0 0 2863 4011 564 3 6 90 (ignore) 2 0 0 188480 27132 2 0 0 0 829 714 0 0 5244 1041 667 1 9 90 2 0 0 188900 16660 1 0 0 0 1231 710 0 3 7215 1425 809 1 10 89 If I see ANY swapping going on should I worry? I don't think so. Some swapping is normal in UNIX in general.
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