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Date:      Sun, 20 Apr 2003 12:19:56 -0700
From:      David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG>
To:        Lucky Green <shamrock@cypherpunks.to>
Cc:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Broken memory management on system with no swap
Message-ID:  <20030420191956.GA4963@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <003201c30751$dccffef0$6601a8c0@VAIO650>
References:  <20030420101401.GA2821@HAL9000.homeunix.com> <003201c30751$dccffef0$6601a8c0@VAIO650>

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On Sun, Apr 20, 2003, Lucky Green wrote:
> David wrote quoting Bruce:
> > > So the bug is mainly in vm making only a relatively useless 
> > statistic 
> > > available.  On my systems, `Inact' is usually mainly for 
> > (non-dirty) 
> > > VMIO pages.
> > 
> > Right.  dillon was planning to separate out the dirty and 
> > clean pages in the inactive queue at some point.  ISTR that 
> > his intent was along the lines of optimizing write clustering 
> > by making dirty pages easier to find, or something along 
> > those lines.  But the number of inactive dirty pages is 
> > useful as a statistic by itself, too.
> 
> So how do I find out what is consuming those "inactive" pages? And how
> do I determine if those pages can be discarded or not?

'top -ores' will tell you which processes are hogging the most
memory, but the system does not keep accurate statistics on clean
vs dirty or swap-backed vs fs-backed pages.  Nevertheless, that
might give you some idea of where your 1 GB of memory has gone.

> Exactly. Which is why I just replaced my old 128MB RAM/256MB swap server
> with a new 1GB RAM server. I still fail to understand why a setup that
> never was anywhere near running out of memory in the previous
> configuration would run out of memory with more RAM than it had RAM and
> swap combined. If I can't do in 1GB what I could do in 128 + 256 MB,
> then somewhere there is a bug. How do I find out where?

It would be useful to know whether dillon's suggestion fixes your
problem.



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