Date: Wed, 06 Oct 1999 03:06:41 -0700 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: "TFC WLAN 97/98 - IST - ext.2269 (8418269)" <wlan@feldspato.ist.utl.pt> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Inactive memory Message-ID: <199910061006.DAA01900@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 06 Oct 1999 10:48:31 BST." <Pine.LNX.4.05.9910061039020.1504-100000@feldspato.ist.utl.pt>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>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-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199910061006.DAA01900>