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>
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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.
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