Cache Memory in top command

[RW]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2010 06:13:42 -0500 (CDT)
Scott Bennett <bennett at cs.niu.edu> wrote:

>      On Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:42:30 +0100 Bruce Cran <bruce at cran.org.uk>
> wrote:

> >You can find more information about the VM architecture at
> >http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/arch-handbook/vm.html .
> >
>      The top(1) man page is clearly in error, at least on FreeBSD
> systems. The descriptions of the Active, Inact, Wired, Cache, Buf,
> and Free fields are all wrong inasmuch as the word "pages" in each
> should instead be "bytes". For example, top on my system at present
> shows:
> 
> Mem: 1099M Active, 401M Inact, 262M Wired, 88M Cache, 112M Buf, 143M
> Free
> 
> Consider the value given for "Wired" (i.e., page-fixed pages, which
> cannot exceed the number of page frames on the machine, of course.)
> Now, either "M" has some extraordinary definition, or it means
> "mega", though presumably in the classical computing sense of the
> power of 2 that is closest to one million. 

It does actually say, just above, that M and K are megabytes and
kilobytes. It is wrong though, in that it has "number of pages" when
it should have "memory from pages" or just "pages"