RAM/Memory resources on 7 STABLE

[RW]

On Fri, 16 Jan 2009 22:23:06 +0100 (CET)
Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> wrote:

> > When I boot this machine it usually shows (in top) about 11 G Free
> > in the Mem: line
> >
> > The machine, in this snippet, has been up for 5 days 22 hours and
> > change and it now shows 1436M free in the Mem: line
> > I've been watching the number and it has been slowly decreasing
> > over the 5 days since its last boot.  It looks like as the Free
> > line trends down, the Inact value trends up to keep the total Mem
> > used at the installed 12G
> 
> ALL unused memory is used as disk cache in FreeBSD.

Although, looking at the output of top, most of the memory is in the
inactive state. As I understand it cache pages go from active to
cached, and the inactive queue contains pages that need to be written
out to swap before they can be reused.

The very high level of inactive memory looks suspiciously like a
memory-leak to me. Hopefully someone who knows more about this will
step in - don't take my word for it.