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Date:      Thu, 26 Aug 1999 11:57:29 +0900
From:      chas <panda@skinnyhippo.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   High Inactive memory levels - cause for concern ?
Message-ID:  <3.0.5.32.19990826115729.009454d0@mail.skinnyhippo.com>

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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







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