From owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org  Tue Mar  7 07:02:47 2017
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Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2017 10:02:42 +0300
From: Slawa Olhovchenkov <slw@zxy.spb.ru>
To: Erich Dollansky <erichsfreebsdlist@alogt.com>
Cc: "stable@freebsd.org" <stable@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: slow machine, swap in use, but more than 5GB of RAM inactive
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On Tue, Mar 07, 2017 at 10:19:35AM +0800, Erich Dollansky wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I wonder about the slow speed of my machine while top shows ample
> inactive memory:
> 
> last pid: 85287;  load averages:  2.56,  2.44, 1.68 
> up 6+10:24:45 10:13:36 191 processes: 5 running, 186 sleeping 
> CPU 0: 47.1% user,  0.0% nice, 51.4% system, 0.0% interrupt,  1.6% idle 
> CPU 1: 38.4% user,  0.0% nice, 60.4% system,  0.0% interrupt, 1.2% idle 
> CPU 2: 38.8% user,  0.0% nice, 59.2% system,  0.0% interrupt, 2.0% idle 
> CPU 3: 45.5% user,  0.0% nice, 51.0% system,  0.4% interrupt, 3.1% idle 
> Mem: 677M Active, 5600M Inact, 1083M Wired, 178M Cache, 816M Buf,301M
> Free 
> Swap: 16G Total, 1352M Used, 15G Free, 8% Inuse
> 
> The swap space in use can be explained by large compilations done
> recently. Why is the inactive memory not put to use.
> 
> I do not want to restart the machine. So, if I could help find the
> source of the problem, I would do.

inactive is not 'not used' memory.
this is just pages don't touched in last 10(?) seconds, but all of
this allocated (such as malloc, mmap, sendfile) to application
(userland programs).