From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Mar 21 08:51:25 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DB2C516A46F for ; Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:51:25 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from shoesoft@gmx.net) Received: from mail.gmx.net (mail.gmx.net [213.165.64.20]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 21D2313C45D for ; Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:51:24 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from shoesoft@gmx.net) Received: (qmail invoked by alias); 21 Mar 2007 08:51:23 -0000 Received: from h081217094222.dyn.cm.kabsi.at (EHLO taxman.pepperland) [81.217.94.222] by mail.gmx.net (mp029) with SMTP; 21 Mar 2007 09:51:23 +0100 X-Authenticated: #16703784 X-Provags-ID: V01U2FsdGVkX1/OPoN6pl3OhpQk4Y7n3JscJSduQuKBeSPcsBchEr kOZaKmdLJqk0/Q From: Stefan Ehmann To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 09:51:22 +0100 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.6 References: <200703200944.l2K9i7YC044370@lurza.secnetix.de> In-Reply-To: <200703200944.l2K9i7YC044370@lurza.secnetix.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200703210951.22869.shoesoft@gmx.net> X-Y-GMX-Trusted: 0 Subject: Re: Possible memory leak? X-BeenThere: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Production branch of FreeBSD source code List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:51:25 -0000 On Tuesday 20 March 2007 10:44:07 Oliver Fromme wrote: > Stefan Ehmann wrote: > > Sometimes I'm noticing very high memory usage. Nearly my whole memory > > (1GB) is used although I'm running my usual set of processes - normally > > memory usage is much lower. > > That's normal. FreeBSD uses nearly all free memory for > buffer cache and other kinds of caches. > > > I killed most processes but memory usage remains high. > > How do you measure "memory usage"? The numbers from top(1) > are mostly meaningless. Personally I think top should be > removed from FreeBSD, because it confuses many people (in > fact I think _most_ people don't interpret the numbers > correctly), but some people seem to be in love with it. :-) Obviously I'm one of those people that got it wrong. My mistake was to think that a memory page is moved to the inactive/cache list automatically if it's not used for a longer time. But if I got it correctly now, this only happens when there's some kind of memory shortage and the pageout daemon is not sleeping. Now that I think I understand it better, those numbers also seem okay to me. :) What got me suspicious at first was that the systems sometimes started to swap although there should have been more than enough memory to fit all processes in physical memory. But I see this is also in the FAQ. Thanks for all your help and hints. Stefan