From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 25 20:20:11 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.SKINNYHIPPO.COM (mail.SKINNYHIPPO.COM [216.25.13.94]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9FDC314EE7 for ; Wed, 25 Aug 1999 20:20:03 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from panda@skinnyhippo.com) Received: from egg [202.188.111.43] by mail.SKINNYHIPPO.COM (SMTPD32-5.05) id A2802B2801C2; Wed, 25 Aug 1999 23:20:32 -0400 Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990826115729.009454d0@mail.skinnyhippo.com> X-Sender: panda@mail.skinnyhippo.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 3.0.5 (32) Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 11:57:29 +0900 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: chas Subject: High Inactive memory levels - cause for concern ? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Good morning, 'top' on my FreeBSD box shows the following : last pid: 36826; load averages: 0.15, 0.31, 0.33 131 processes: 1 running, 130 sleeping CPU states: 0.4% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 0.4% interrupt, 99.2% idle Mem: 28M Active, 218M Inact, 22M Wired, 20M Cache, 8348K Buf, 214M Free Swap: 700M Total, 700M Free What caught my attention was the high value for "Inactive" memory. I've scoured the archive and most people seem to have a low "Inact" value, and few people have it more than the "Active" value. I found a very good post by David Gree, which stated : "The numbers represent the number of VM pages on various internal page queues that the kernel manages. The "active" queue is a queue of pages that the kernel, for a variety of reasons, considers "active". The "inactive" queue is similarly named, but is also used as a way of controlling the amount of dirty pages in the system (pages are moved to the inactive queue prior to being cleaned by the pagedaemon)." If I understand this correct and applying to my 'top' output (above), the Inact level means that I have 218 MB of RAM that has been used and is about to be released again. How long should it take for this to happen ? My Inact level has been hovering about 220 MB continuously. This box is just running a webserver and MySQL, averge 1.5 million hits/day with about 80% of pages being dynamically generated (straight python CGI). Is it anything to worry about ? chas To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message