Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1999 15:28:58 +0000 From: Adam Goryachev <adamg@netlink.co.uk> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Inactive Pages Message-ID: <36ADDF3A.D50FA949@netlink.co.uk> References: <Pine.GSU.4.05.9901252229490.27237-100000@www.ainet.com> <36ADC6E7.62D929C2@eclipse.net.uk>
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OK, I have seen a number of discussions on the mailing list archives regarding
what Active pages and inactive pages and buf etc all refer to.... but I have a
slightly different question.
The way I understand all this is that Inact pages are pages that are
available, but they need some sort of processing before they can be malloc'ed
or show up in the Free section.
Now I have noticed on a rather busy web server that upon startup everything
flies along smoothly, but the amount in the inactiv section just continues
increasing.... the only time it truly seems to decrease is when apache is not
running.
Also, occasionally, the load average goes right up (sometimes up over 100) and
a process called pagedaemon is using up all the CPU time... (all in the system
section). As soon as apache is killed, it's CPU utilisation drops down to 0
within a minute or two, and restarting apache works fine for another few
hours....
This is running on FreeBSD 2.2.8 with apache 1.3.3
Top excerpt:
last pid: 22687; load averages: 51.05, 57.35, 37.37
15:19:57
242 processes: 60 running, 182 sleeping
CPU states: 4.4% user, 2.2% nice, 92.1% system, 1.3% interrupt, 0.0% idle
Mem: 140K Active, 364M Inact, 65M Wired, 57M Cache, 8350K Buf, 17M Free
Swap: 214M Total, 5652K Used, 209M Free, 3% Inuse
PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND
2 root -18 -5 0K 12K psleep 194:00 86.82% 86.82% pagedaemon
4 root 34 0 0K 12K update 55:54 0.50% 0.50% update
21894 httpd 2 0 11832K 10380K sbwait 0:01 0.19% 0.19% httpd
22191 httpd 2 0 11856K 10404K select 0:00 0.08% 0.08% httpd
It seems to me that there is supposed to be some sort of cleaning process
running to move pages from the Inactiv to the Free, (is that what pagedaemon
does??) but it isn't doing this properly.
If anyone has any ideas on this, please let me know.
PS, machine has a total of 512Mb RAM.
Regards,
Adam Goryachev
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