Date: Wed, 05 Jan 2000 12:56:18 -0800 From: Ludwig Pummer <ludwigp@bigfoot.com> To: up@3.am Cc: FreeBSD ISP List <freebsd-isp@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Why I have to reboot at times; was:RE: uptimes, Woo Hoo Message-ID: <3873AFF2.B7FC4C88@bigfoot.com> References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10001051448030.22323-100000@richard2.pil.net>
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up@3.am wrote: > there appears to be some sort of memory leak that I can't track down to a > specific process (I have 256MB on this box): > > Mem: 87M Active, 129M Inact, 25M Wired, 6332K Cache, 8343K Buf, 4196K Free > Swap: 517M Total, 517M Free > > After a reboot, this will have well over 100MB free, and gradually eat all > but a few MB of it, but rarely (if ever) touch swap. I've done top, ps > amx, and I don't see anything particularly huge. I also tried a virgin ps > (just in case I'd been hacked), and seen no difference. This has been asked quite a few times on one -questions. A search of the archives (query string was Free AND Inact AND greenman) returned many of the responses by David Greenman on the subject. http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=1177643+1180919+/usr/local/www/db/text/1999/freebsd-questions/19991010.freebsd-questions ----- On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, David Greenman wrote: > >Is there a way to turn inactive memory into free memory in > >freeBSD 3.2. ? > > > >I have 512MB of RAM but a significant part (300MB) is only > >reported as free for a few hours after a reboot, > >then it becomes "inactive". > > > >I think that's why we have a slow system, specially with regard > >to Pine that takes for ever to close/open a large mailbox, because it > >spends a lot of time allocating memory (during that time the systems > >becomes very slow)... > > > >Here's the first lines of 'top': > > > >last pid: 50917; load averages: 0.03, 0.03, 0.00 up 1+21:35:32 > >10:46:50 > >94 processes: 1 running, 93 sleeping > >CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 0.0% system, 0.0% interrupt, 100% > >idle > >Mem: 32M Active, 419M Inact, 26M Wired, 14M Cache, 8265K Buf, 11M Free > >Swap: 964M Total, 964M Free > > > > > >Any suggestions, hints ? > > Your system would be a lot slower without inactive memory. Basically what > that stat is telling you is that the system was able to use a large amount of > otherwise free memory for file caching, speeding up your applications > significantly. FreeBSD always tries to retain data that is useful; free pages > are just dead, useless pages that contain no useful data. The process of > moving pages from the various queues (inactive, cache, etc) to 'free' is > very fast and in most cases has almost zero overhead. In short, if your > system is slow when running 'pine', then it is for some other reason. > > -DG > > David Greenman > Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org > Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com > Pave the road of life with opportunities. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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