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Date: Mon, 6 Nov 2006 11:22:02 -0600
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To: Roselyn Lee <rosel@verniernetworks.com>
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Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: free memory keeps going down on 5.4-release
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In the last episode (Nov 06), Roselyn Lee said:
> We're running freebsd 5-4 release and notice that an idle system's
> free memroy keeps decreasing.  The system has 1 GB memory and the
> free mem starts at ~700M and goes down steadily until it hits 2M and
> stays there.  After that bringing up more apps on the system doesn't
> seem to make the free memory any smaller.  I checked top and vmstat
> -m, vmstat -z and can't see where all that memory is going.  Does
> freebsd use memory for disk caching that is not accounted for in
> these stats?

Yes, free memory is used as cache.  As "Free" decreases, you will see
"Inact, "Cache" and "Buf" increase.  

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com