where did all my memory go?

[Eric Anderson]

Brooks Davis wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 12:12:10PM -0800, Sean McNeil wrote:
> 
>>With a system built yesterday on my amd64, I had plenty of memory
>>showing as free when the system completely started up.  Even after
>>intense usage I showed lots of free memory in top.  Over night at some
>>point all my memory is no longer free but inactive.  Is there anything
>>wrong here or is this expected behavior?  ps doesn't show any serious
>>usage by any particular process.  Also, if disk caches or something were
>>taking up the memory, I would expect it to have shown a lot earlier.
> 
> 
> On a system that has been up for any significant time, free memory
> should be very small since free memory is wasted.  My guess is that it
> is disk cache and that one of the nightly jobs accessed enough stuff to
> fill it.

Speaking of this - is there a way to flush the disk cache?  

Eric



-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.
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