From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jan 27 06:05:32 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id GAA18469 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Wed, 27 Jan 1999 06:05:32 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from blackcat.netlink.co.uk (blackcat.netlink.co.uk [194.88.142.254]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id GAA18464 for ; Wed, 27 Jan 1999 06:05:30 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from adamg@netlink.co.uk) Received: from netlink.co.uk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by blackcat.netlink.co.uk (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id OAA29608 for ; Wed, 27 Jan 1999 14:05:28 GMT Message-ID: <36AF1D27.DBFA5EA8@netlink.co.uk> Date: Wed, 27 Jan 1999 14:05:27 +0000 From: Adam Goryachev Organization: Netlink Internet X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.0.36 i686) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Inactive Pages References: <36ADC6E7.62D929C2@eclipse.net.uk> <36ADDF3A.D50FA949@netlink.co.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message