From owner-freebsd-stable Thu May 9 7:34:41 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from maila.telia.com (maila.telia.com [194.22.194.231]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C60A137B406 for ; Thu, 9 May 2002 07:34:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from d1o913.telia.com (d1o913.telia.com [195.252.44.241]) by maila.telia.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g49EYUF05825 for ; Thu, 9 May 2002 16:34:30 +0200 (CEST) Received: from falcon.midgard.homeip.net (h53n2fls20o913.telia.com [212.181.163.53]) by d1o913.telia.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id QAA06300 for ; Thu, 9 May 2002 16:34:30 +0200 (CEST) Received: (qmail 28519 invoked by uid 1001); 9 May 2002 14:34:28 -0000 Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 16:34:27 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson To: Tod McQuillin Cc: MikeM , freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Steadily increasing memory usage on a lightly loaded server Message-ID: <20020509143427.GA28486@student.uu.se> Mail-Followup-To: Tod McQuillin , MikeM , freebsd-stable@freebsd.org References: <20020509140719.GA28169@student.uu.se> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.99i Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 09:19:39AM -0500, Tod McQuillin wrote: > On Thu, 9 May 2002, Erik Trulsson wrote: > > > The memory that is marked as 'Inactive' is also available for allocation > > just as the 'Free' memory. In practice you can just add together the > > 'Inactive' and the 'Free' memory to get the total of free memory. > > Not quite -- if I understand it correctly, 'Inactive' is still part of a > running process's address space (or buffer cache) but has not had it's > page-used bit turned on since the last time it was cleared. > > > The 'Inactive' memory contains data that *can* be reused (such as the > > code for programs that has recently been run) but that can also be > > thrown away without further notice if necessary. > > I think you are thinking of 'Cache', not 'Inactive'. Pages in the > inactive queue are still dirty, so they must be paged out before they can > be reused. 'Cache' pages are clean, so they can be reused at any time. > > See http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/vm-design/x78.html > for details. It seems you are right, and my understanding of which was which of the 'Inactive', 'Cached' and 'Buf' categories was not quite correct. My main point still stands though in that having lots of memory moved from 'Free' to 'Inactive' is normal and nothing to worry about. -- Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message