From owner-freebsd-current Tue Jan 26 17:40:21 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA04093 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Tue, 26 Jan 1999 17:40:21 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [209.157.86.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA04082 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 1999 17:40:19 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.9.2/8.9.1) id RAA27083; Tue, 26 Jan 1999 17:40:13 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 17:40:13 -0800 (PST) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <199901270140.RAA27083@apollo.backplane.com> To: Dan Root Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Memory usage weirdness References: <19990126183430.A61727@thekeep.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG : :What would cause more memory to be considered in the active state than :could be accounted for by running processes? : :My main machine (running -current as of the afternoon of Jan 25) has :somewhere between 80 and 100 megs of memory listed as used via ps and top :(which, I presume doesn't take in to account shared executable pages, but :does include the 16 megs the X server is mapping on the video card), yet :both top and vmstat show over 170 megs worth of memory being active. : :Furthermore, if I kill off my X session and associated processes, active :memory usage doesn't decrease, even after 5 or more minutes. According to :... There are two different things here: (1) AVM ( Active Virtual Memory ) and ARM ( Active Real Memory ). These might include device mmaps that are not considered real memory by the paging subsystem ( though I believe I've fixed the AVM thingy where X would mmap /dev/mem and AVM would become insane ). (2) VM Paging queue statistics wired, active, inactive, cache, free. The VM system does not bother moving things from active to inactive unless there is some stress on the memory subsystem. If you are just sitting idle, I wouldn't expect to see active pages moved to inactive. X consists of quite a few direct maps of code, and less in the way of BSS data. So when you exit the X session, only the BSS data, which has no backing store on exit, will have been returned ( active->free queue ). The mmap'd code, which is vnode-backed, just stays active until something stresses the memory subsystem. -Matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message