From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Apr 19 18:13:46 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id A482A37B404; Sat, 19 Apr 2003 18:13:46 -0700 (PDT) Received: from noisebox.cypherpunks.to (adsl-208-201-229-163.sonic.net [208.201.229.163]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 15E7843FE1; Sat, 19 Apr 2003 18:13:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from shamrock@cypherpunks.to) Received: from VAIO650 (adsl-208-201-229-160.sonic.net [208.201.229.160]) (using TLSv1 with cipher RC4-MD5 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by noisebox.cypherpunks.to (Postfix) with ESMTP id B0AB410D; Sat, 19 Apr 2003 18:13:45 -0700 (PDT) From: "Lucky Green" To: Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 18:13:43 -0700 Message-ID: <001701c306da$160920c0$6601a8c0@VAIO650> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627 In-Reply-To: <20030420002940.GB46590@HAL9000.homeunix.com> X-MIMEOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 Importance: Normal Subject: RE: Broken memory management on system with no swap X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 01:13:47 -0000 David wrote: > ``Inactive'' just means that the page just hasn't been > accessed for a while and is a candidtate for replacement. > However, on a system without swap, the system has nowhere to > send the page if it is dirty. The only pages that can always > be discarded and reused are those in the ``Cache'' and > ``Free'' categories. > > So the bottom line is that you really are running out of memory. Ah! That was not clear to me from reading the VM docs. It now appears that the culprit is GBDE. Copying a 700MB file from the GBDE partition to another drive causes the inactive memory to increase by roughly the file size. Within about a minute after the copy has completed, the inactive memory drops from over 700MB to about 500MB and remains there. Which would explain why the server is running out of memory. Unmounting the GBDE partition reduces the inactive memory down to 130MB, but still does not appear to recover all memory used by the copying process. --Lucky