Memory management

[Stephane Dupille]

  Hello there,

  I have a computer running FreeBSD 6.1.

  As time passing by, the memory fills up. When the machine starts,
memory is occupied to 30 %, and after two or three weeks memory is
occupied to 100 % and it begins to use swap.

  It is "inactive" pages that fills up the memory.

  I tried to restart every process, but memory usage does not
decrease. Only a reboot can fix that. And I'm not able to see which
process leaks.

  I was not able to find a correct definition of what "inactive"
memory is. First, I would like to know what are these kind of pages :
wired, active, inactive, cache and free.

  Is that normal that inactive memory usage grows ? What should I do ?

  Do you have any tools to monitor memory usage of processes ?

  Many thanks, regards,