Date: Thu, 09 May 2002 21:14:19 -0400 From: "MikeM" <MyRaQ@mgm51.com> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Steadily increasing memory usage on a lightly loaded server Message-ID: <200205092114190775.00FC1737@luna.affordablehost.com> In-Reply-To: <200205100004.g4A04Q2n029553@apollo.backplane.com> References: <20020509143427.GA28486@student.uu.se> <B8FFFDA1.CD1C%freebsd@damnhippie.dyndns.org> <20020509164709.GA29822@student.uu.se> <200205100004.g4A04Q2n029553@apollo.backplane.com>
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On 5/9/2002 at 5:04 PM Matthew Dillon wrote: |: |: What this means is that FreeBSD will not try very hard to separate |: out dirty pages (inactive queue) from clean pages (cache queue) when |: the system is not being stressed, nor will it try to deactivate |: pages (active queue -> inactive queue) when the system is not being |: stressed, even if they are not being used. |: |: |:My interpretation is that the inactive queue does not really hold pages |:that are "dirty but not recently referenced" but rather pages that are |:"possibly dirty and not recently referenced", while the cache queue |:holds pages that are known not to be dirty. |:This probably means that under a normal load most of the pages in the |:inactive queue are not in fact dirty. |: |:<Insert your favourite quote here.> |:Erik Trulsson |:ertr1013@student.uu.se | | You are correct. If the system is not being stressed you can wind | up with a large number of pages marked 'active' which are really | inactive, and a large number of pages marked 'inactive' which are | really cache. The original posting had this: | | Mem: 23M Active, 618M Inact, 69M Wired, 40M Cache, 86M Buf, 1328K Free | | This looks like a fairly unstressed system to me. The actual | definitions for the page queues are: | [snip] ============= Correct, the system is very lighted loaded. The second part of my original question, which has been overlooked in these most excellent discussions, is why am I seeing this only recently. Let me explain the series of events that led up to my decision to post my original message. I colo'd this server around the end of February 2002 with version 4.5 of the OS. On March 1 I installed the phpSysInfo page (example: http://phpsysinfo.sourceforge.net/phpsysinfo). Each morning since February, I have checked the logs and the phpSysInfo page. Each morning, the Physical Memory bar graph was low and green. Then, after applying the recent two security patches, the bar all of a sudden turned red and hung out around 95% utilization. I now understand that the current memory utilization is A Good Thing. And I have actually been keeping up with the discussions regarding *why* it is a good thing. But I remain curious why why I am seeing this behavior after the recent patches, and why I didn't see this behavior from the first day I colo'd the server. In my cvsup file, I am following the RELENG_4_5 tag. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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