From owner-freebsd-questions  Wed Jan 21 09:54:01 1998
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	Wed, 21 Jan 1998 11:53:38 -0600 (CST)
Message-ID: <19980121115338.12041@emsphone.com>
Date: Wed, 21 Jan 1998 11:53:38 -0600
From: Dan Nelson <dnelson@emsphone.com>
To: Costa Morris <costa@cortx.com>
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: ram question
References: <01bd2692$66e709e0$0cddcfcf@cman.cortx.com>
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In the last episode (Jan 21), Costa Morris said:
> i have 128MB of ram installed in 2.2.5.   i reconfigured the kernel
> for the extra ram.
> 
> ie.
> options         "MAXMEM=(128*1024)"
> 
> when i run a top i get this:
> Mem: 72M Active, 6440K Inact, 15M Wired, 20M Cache, 8345K Buf, 11M Free

72+6+15+20+8+11 == 132, which is sorta close 128MB.  You can see
exactly how much memory FreeBSD detected by running "sysctl hw".
 
> can someone explain to me how to read it.  i fugured i should have
> more than 11M free.  just need to see if all the ram is being used
> properly.

11M is actually pretty high.  Expect to see from 1-5M in the Free
column most of the time.  FreeBSD uses free memory as a disk cache (the
Cache and Buf fields).  All your 'top' display shows is that you
probably just rebooted your machine, so FreeBSD hasn't needed to cache
more than 28M of data yet.  Or you just exited a program that had
allocated 10MB of memory.

	-Dan Nelson
	dnelson@emsphone.com