Can 10M Buffer Ceiling be lowere?

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 03:27:11AM +0000, r.p.demarco at att.net wrote:
>      A technical question:
> 
>      I have an old NEC computer (c. 1997) running 5.3-RELEASE with
> 48M of RAM.  Getting a new computer isn't an option right now, but
> I would like to get as much out of my memory as possible.
>      My /boot/kernel/kernel file is about 3M, and from the initial
> boot: 
> 		real memory  = 50331648 (48 MB)
> 		avail memory = 43896832 (41 MB)
> it appears this kernel takes up about 7M of memory with one screen saver
> kld loaded.  With a few unneeded services (cron, sendmail) disabled, I
> start off with about 26M free after a fresh reboot with just root logged in,
> running `top'.  Looking at top, I noticed:
> 
>                 Mem: 4320K Active, 15M Inact, 12M Wired, 10M Buf, 11M Free
>                                                          ^^^
> 
>      From TOP(1):
> 
>                 Buf: number of pages used for BIO-level disk caching
> 
>      Actually, the 10M is after some disk usage (it starts ~6M).
> It never gets above 10M.  Is there anyway to adjust this, to
> (say) a maximum of 5M?  Yes, a new 256 MB RAM system would be nice,
> but until then, I would like to avoid serious paging running xclock :)
> Thanks,

There's no point, that memory will be used if demanded.  Note that you
still have 11M free in your example, so throwing away 6MB that is used
for caching would only *reduce* performance.

Kris
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