Date: Sun, 8 Nov 1998 12:20:59 -0800 (PST) From: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com> To: David Greenman <dg@root.com> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Err...something fishy going on in top. Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9811081217130.5670-100000@alive.znep.com> In-Reply-To: <199811030905.BAA13428@implode.root.com>
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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.
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