top memory usage question

[Eitan Adler]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 12:52 PM, Coert <lgroups at waagmeester.co.za> wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Just a question, on Linux the output of top's memory usage looks like this:
>
> Mem:   2075424k total,  1760848k used,   314576k free,   151872k buffers
> Swap:  4192924k total,        0k used,  4192924k free,  1214052k cached
>
>
> on FreeBSD:
>
> Mem: 48M Active, 945M Inact, 190M Wired, 112M Buf, 804M Free
> Swap: 4063M Total, 4063M Free
>
>
> I have looked at the respective man pages, and googled.
> Where can I find out what Active, Inactive, and Wired mean?
>

The differences have to do with the way memory is managed. Active
memory is currently is RAM and is being used by a currently running
process. Inactive is in RAM but is not currently being used. Wired
means that the page is locked into ram and won't be paged out.

Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory for more info












-- 
Eitan Adler