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To: "Joseph I. Davida" <jd@slip129-37-223-142.ca.us.ibm.net>
cc: bugs@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Mem Leak ?? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Thu, 18 Sep 1997 22:11:20 MST."
             <199709190511.WAA13160@slip129-37-223-142.ca.us.ibm.net> 
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 20:56:20 +0800
From: Peter Wemm <peter@spinner.dialix.com.au>
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"Joseph I. Davida" wrote:
[..]
> 	When I try to run netscape (version 4.3b8), I get a message
> 	from netscape that I am out of memory. SO I looked at what
> 	vmstat was saying:

Most likely you have actually run into the relatively low default resource
limit for data memory allocation per process (32MB I think).  Netscape
seems to easily hit this, the communicator version moreso than the lite
version.

>  procs      memory     page                    disks      faults      cpu
>  r b w     avm   fre  flt  re  pi  po  fr  sr s0 c0 w0   in   sy  cs us sy id
>  1 0 0 4033532 21008   13   0   0   0  14   0  1  0  0  166  172  30  1  0 99
>  0 0 0 4029456 21008    2   0   0   0   0   0  0  0  0  113   76   9  0  0 10
    0
>  0 0 0 4029812 21008   30   0   0   0  33   0  1  0  0  165 1529  48  3  1 96
>  0 0 0 4029812 21008   13   0   0   0  14   0  1  0  0  109   74  10  0  0 10
    0
>  0 0 0 4029812 21008    2   0   0   0   0   0  0  0  0  179  372  55  2  1 97
>  0 0 0 4029812 21008   13   0   0   0  14   0  1  0  0  242 50055  96 16 40 4
    4
>  0 0 0 4029812 21008   18   0   0   0  19   0  0  0  0  139 1467  37  3  1 96
> 
> 
> 	Holy smokes!! Where did all my free pages go????
> 
> 	Here is the message from bootup, which shows I have plenty of
> 	free memory. So where did all the mem go??? Is the kernel losing
> 	track of free'ed up memory? Also, look at output of ps -agxl below
> 	so you can check resident set sizes.

As I've heard somewhere before, "Free memory is wasted memory".  Seriously 
though, FreeBSD uses all available memory for disk buffering and data 
caching.  It's more like 'freeable memory' than 'free memory'.  The 
problem is that the system doesn't really keep an accurate count of what 
is 'in memory but can be dumped instantly'.  If you look at the output of 
top, you'll see a lot of memory under 'wired', 'cache' and 'buf'.  Some of 
these are freeable, some not.

Cheers,
-Peter