Strange networking behaviour (memory leak?)

[William Palfreman]

On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Adam wrote:

> When copying files over the network, the free memory on my FreeBSD box
> drops at a rate of about 30MB every couple seconds. It eventually
> bottoms out at about 500k free.
>
> If I kill the active transfer, the amount of free RAM is not affected.
> However, if I delete the file that was being written to the FreeBSD box,
> the free RAM instantaneously increases by about 400-450MB. Note that
> this has only been tested on transfers of large files (>600MB).

Doesn't that just mean the OS is caching the file in memory, in case it
needs it immediately?  Then when you delete it, the file can no longer
be needed immediately, as it doesn't exist, so the memory cache can be
freed up right away.

I take it the system isn't swapping madly or you aren't seeing processes
die due to out of memory errors?  If not it just seems like normal
operation to me.

Bill.