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Date: Tue, 7 Mar 2017 23:30:58 +1100 (EST)
From: Ian Smith <smithi@nimnet.asn.au>
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, 7 Mar 2017 10:19:35 +0800, Erich Dollansky wrote:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > I wonder about the slow speed of my machine while top shows ample
 > inactive memory:

( quoting from this top output because it's neater :)

 > 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

Others have covered the swap / inactive memory issue.

But I'd expect this to be slow, for any new work anyway .. there's next 
to no idle on any CPU.  I'd be asking, what's all of that system usage?

cheers, Ian