Date: Thu, 28 May 1998 17:19:50 -0700 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@monkeys.com> Cc: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How do I find out how much memory the kernel is using now? Message-ID: <199805290019.RAA18059@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 27 May 1998 15:31:02 PDT." <27896.896308262@monkeys.com>
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>Due to some goofy partitioning left over from another project, I have a >HUGE 1.5 GB swap partition. Top shows that (on average) I am only using >about 1% of that, which superficially sounds quite modest and OK, until >I looked more closely and saw that the truth of that matter is that I'm >constantly using about 18 MB of swap... mostly due to a single big process >that I know is thrashing its actual working set a lot. > >So at last I have my answer. I need to put at least 18 MB more main memory >into this machine in order to get it to stop behaving like a whashing machine >with a unbalanced load set to the `spin' cycle. :-) I'll be doing that >forthwith. FreeBSD will swap out idle pages even when you have plenty of RAM for the process. It does this to make more room for the disk cache...and this behavior does improve overall performance. So it isn't uncommon to have some stuff in swap even though the system isn't paging heavily. The thing to watch for is pageins/outs which top also displays when they occur. A high rate of paging is bad, but a page or three every few seconds is nothing to worry about. -DG David Greenman Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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