From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Oct 2 12:56:13 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from smtp.pe.net (smtp.pe.net [205.139.56.34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 53AB615382 for ; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 12:56:05 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dmahoney@smtp.pe.net) Received: (from dmahoney@localhost) by smtp.pe.net (8.9.1/8.9.1) id MAA21292 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Sat, 2 Oct 1999 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT) From: Dan Mahoney Message-Id: <199910021956.MAA21292@smtp.pe.net> Subject: "Top" shows large amount of "inact" RAM To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 2 Oct 1999 12:56:04 -0700 (PDT) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I have been watching the output of "top" on my FreeBSD 3.2 system, and I was wondering if anyone could help me undestand a little better? 'top" currently shows 318 M active, 113 inactive, 51 M wired, 13M cache, 8341 K buff, 2744K free (this is on a dual-CPU system with 512 MB phyiscal RAM). I also see 668K out of 512 M of swap in use. Here's my confusion: shouldn't the inactive RAM be getting cleared out and reused, instead of starting to hit the swap space? Or is my understanding of the process unclear? I *did* check the mailing list archives, but all I got out of that was a little more confusion. It appears that a couple other folks have asked very similar questions over the last two or three weeks, but without a clear resolution that I can see. Dan Mahoney dmahoney@pe.net To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message