From owner-freebsd-current Sun Nov 8 12:25:37 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id MAA16976 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Sun, 8 Nov 1998 12:25:37 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from alive.znep.com (207-178-54-226.go2net.com [207.178.54.226]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id MAA16971 for ; Sun, 8 Nov 1998 12:25:34 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from marcs@znep.com) Received: from localhost (marcs@localhost) by alive.znep.com (8.9.1/8.9.1) with ESMTP id MAA07787; Sun, 8 Nov 1998 12:20:59 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from marcs@znep.com) Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 12:20:59 -0800 (PST) From: Marc Slemko To: David Greenman cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Err...something fishy going on in top. In-Reply-To: <199811030905.BAA13428@implode.root.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 3 Nov 1998, David Greenman wrote: > >I rebuilt world a couple of hours ago, from a cvsup at around 8:30 CST > >tonight. When I rebooted, the box seemed slower than it should have been. > >To make a long story short, in the process of doing stuff, I noticed that > >whenever there's heavy disk i/o, instead of the amount of memory dedicated > >to cache increasing, the amount of memory being listed as inactive was > >increasing. Huh? I'm confused. Right now, it looks like none of my > >memory is being used for file cacheing, even though I have > 32 MB free. > >What am I missing? > > You're missing what it all actually means. "cache" is a queue, not an > indication of caching. The same is also true for "active", "inactive", and > "free" - they are just various page queues that the system moves pages > between depending on their priority. A change was made recently so that the top man page says things like: Cache: number of pages used for VM-level disk caching Buf: number of pages used for BIO-level disk caching It would be useful if someone who understood the exact semantics of each could make the docs a bit more... verbose. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message