From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Dec 9 17:34:26 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from freebie.atkielski.com (ASt-Lambert-101-2-1-14.abo.wanadoo.fr [193.251.59.14]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1EAEB37B417 for ; Sun, 9 Dec 2001 17:34:24 -0800 (PST) Received: from contactdish (contactdish.atkielski.com [10.0.0.10]) by freebie.atkielski.com (8.11.3/8.11.3) with SMTP id fBA1YMx25643 for ; Mon, 10 Dec 2001 02:34:22 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from anthony@freebie.atkielski.com) Message-ID: <00ac01c1811a$cb534790$0a00000a@atkielski.com> From: "Anthony Atkielski" To: "FreeBSD Questions" Subject: Diminishing free memory in top Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2001 02:34:21 +0100 Organization: Anthony's Home Page (development site) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG I note when running top that the "Free" memory figure gradually diminishes over time on the system, even (and perhaps especially) when the system is idle. Am I correct in assuming that this means that many pages are not necessarily active but still contain potentially useful information and thus have not been freed by FreeBSD because the memory is not yet needed for anything else? This seems to be what I understand from the descriptions of FreeBSD memory management in the handbook, and it is supported by the fact that the free figure jumps to something much larger if I run a program that abruptly requests a lot of memory. This system has 1 GB and apparently has never used the 800 MB swap file, so I know it's not swapping or paging anything out. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message