Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2000 12:14:46 -0400 (EDT) From: Kenneth Wayne Culver <culverk@wam.umd.edu> To: Paul Herman <pherman@frenchfries.net> Cc: Sam Xie <sam@samxie.cl.msu.edu>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: memory leak? Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0006291210440.9768-100000@rac10.wam.umd.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006291800270.828-100000@bagabeedaboo.security.at12.de>
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> > Well, I know for sure that netscape leaks memory, but not that > > much, for most purposes though, the "inactive" memory is free for > > use by other programs, it's just being kept as inactive because > > some program stored in that memory that has exited might be run > > again, and it's faster to run from inactive memory than disk if it > > hasn't been used for anything else... I think my explanation is > > WAY simplified, but I think I got it basically right. > > I think you are thinking about "cache" memory. As far as I understand > it, "inactive" memory is just "active" memory that hasn't been used in > 30 seconds i.e. dirty pages that are still associated with objects and > cannot be reused until they are cleaned or freed (i.e. moved into > either "cache" or "free".) At least, that's how I've understood it. > Hrmm, I don't know, One thing I do know however is that when wmmon and other utilities that put guages on memory usage measure the usage, they measure inactive memory as free... and I've read (I think in the 4.4BSD book) that inactive memory can be considered usable by programs, although I read that about 6 months ago... Maybe I'll look through these books I'm looking at for a class I'm taking here at work... "4.4BSD Kernel Internals: An Intensive Code Walkthrough" I'm sure it'll have the answer because now I wanna know what the answer is :-) Ken To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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