Strange memory problems

[Daniela]

On Wednesday 08 March 2006 14:16, Eugene wrote:
> Hi people,
>
> I have a strange problem with memory.
> System is FreeBSD 5.3, 4GB physical memory.
> Even in very quiet load, memory allocation statistics looks like this:
> last pid: 38330;  load averages:  0.67,  1.05,  1.03  up 6+06:50:14
> 15:52:30
> 159 processes: 2 running, 156 sleeping, 1 zombie
>
> Mem: 757M Active, 2673M Inact, 220M Wired, 107M Cache, 112M Buf, 7000K Free
> Swap: 10G Total, 1884K Used, 10G Free
>
> That is, almost 3GB of memory is Inactive while free memory is almost used
> up.
> If I do 'ps axvf' and sum up the memory columns, I get RSS=1.5GB and
> VSZ=1.9GB (approximately).
> With Apache stopped, it goes down to RSS=0.5GB and VSZ=0.6G -- but Inactive
> Memory remains above 2.5GB.
> Is it a memory leak somewhere or what?

That looks quite normal to me, apart from the zombie process. FreeBSD always 
attempts to occupy most of the RAM, because it's a very fast way of saving 
information, and after all a lot of RAM is of no use if there's nothing in 
it. So long as no other program needs it for more "important" information, 
there's nothing wrong with keeping a lot of "unimportant" stuff around in 
case it is needed again quickly.

-- 
Hope is the worst of all evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.