Where is the memory

[Lowell Gilbert]

<scuba at centroin.com.br> writes:

> On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Chuck Swiger wrote:
> 
> |scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> |[ ... ]
> |> 	My problem is that I think something in the system is allocating
> |> memory and not releasing it.
> |
> |The kernel will attempt to use all but a little RAM reserved as free space to
> |cache stuff from disk, unless and until that memory is needed for something else.
> 
> 	It seems that this is the case. I wrote a small program to
> allocate a large block of memory (more them that shown as free) and the
> system doesn´t swap.

That isn't relevant.  The memory won't even be mapped in until it is
accessed.  

> 	That is the memory top shows as "Inactive"?

I don't understand the question.  I suspect you are looking for the
following bit of the FreeBSD documentation:
http://www.br.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#TOP-FREEMEM