Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 13 Mar 2016 14:55:48 +0000
From:      RW <rwmaillists@googlemail.com>
To:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: how to recycle Inact memory more aggressively?
Message-ID:  <20160313145548.4e011152@gumby.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <20160312093835.727d7197@ernst.home>
References:  <20160312093835.727d7197@ernst.home>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, 12 Mar 2016 09:38:35 +0100
Gary Jennejohn wrote:

> In the course of the last year or so the behavior of the vm system
> has changed in regard to how aggressively Inact memory is recycled.
> 
> My box has 8GB of memory.  At the moment I'm copying 100s of gigabytes
> from one file system to another one.
> 
> Looking at top I observe that there are about 6GB of Inact memory.
> This value hardly changes.  Instead of aggressively recycling the
> Inact memory the vm now seems to prefer to swap.

Paging-out is a side-effect of processing inactive memory. As the
inactive queue is recycled a small number of pages can get copied
out to swap with the contents remaining in memory. If you turn this
off, the writes to can end up being done while something is waiting,
rather than in the background.

A small amount of swap in use is normal. If you see a large amount
then check for memory leaks and unwanted files on tmpfs.









Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20160313145548.4e011152>