Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 21:30:36 +0100 From: Anthony Atkielski <atkielski.anthony@wanadoo.fr> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Memory Question Message-ID: <1493134889.20050113213036@wanadoo.fr> In-Reply-To: <20050113204937.D802@kenmore.kozy-kabin.nl> References: <20050113204937.D802@kenmore.kozy-kabin.nl>
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Colin J. Raven writes: CJR> I always understood in FreeBSD that "Free Memory is wasted memory" In any operating system, free memory is wasted memory. But if you suddenly need more memory and you don't have it, system performance will slide right down into the abyss, no matter which OS you are using ... and very often it's cost-effective to "waste" some extra memory to handle peak loads. Memory's cheap, anyway. CJR> I compared this to the 5.3-RELEASE box of a colleague. CJR> CJR> AMD Athlon (1800-something-or-other) also 1GB RAM CJR> CJR> Mem: 467M Active, 224M Inact, 201M Wired, 33M Cache, 111M Buf, 71M Free CJR> Swap: 4096M Total, 1672K Used, 4094M Free CJR> CJR> Other than the fact that swap doesn't add up (or doesn't seem to) the CJR> box of my colleague seems to have a more "sensible" (classic) amount of CJR> free memory. No, he doesn't have enough memory. A good operating system (which of course would include FreeBSD) can make the best of the memory it has under load, by judicious use of the swap file(s), but even the best swapping algorithms are no match for more RAM. You can never have too much memory. CJR> Is there something I can do in order to "optimize" - which in this CJR> case paradoxically would seem to mean "reduce" the amount of free CJR> memory? General rules: Reducing memory is never an optimization. Increasing memory never reduces performance. -- Anthony
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