slow machine, swap in use, but more than 5GB of RAM inactive

[Erich Dollansky]

Hi,

On Tue, 7 Mar 2017 23:30:58 +1100 (EST)
Ian Smith <smithi at nimnet.asn.au> wrote:

> On Tue, 7 Mar 2017 10:19:35 +0800, Erich Dollansky wrote:
>  > Hi,
>  > 
>  > I wonder about the slow speed of my machine while top shows ample
>  > inactive memory:  
> 
> ( quoting from this top output because it's neater :)
> 
>  > last pid: 85287;  load averages:  2.56,  2.44, 1.68 
>  > up 6+10:24:45 10:13:36 191 processes: 5 running, 186 sleeping 
>  > CPU 0: 47.1% user,  0.0% nice, 51.4% system, 0.0% interrupt,  1.6%
>  > idle CPU 1: 38.4% user,  0.0% nice, 60.4% system,  0.0% interrupt,
>  > 1.2% idle CPU 2: 38.8% user,  0.0% nice, 59.2% system,  0.0%
>  > interrupt, 2.0% idle CPU 3: 45.5% user,  0.0% nice, 51.0% system,
>  > 0.4% interrupt, 3.1% idle Mem: 677M Active, 5600M Inact, 1083M
>  > Wired, 178M Cache, 816M Buf,301M Free 
>  > Swap: 16G Total, 1352M Used, 15G Free, 8% Inuse  
> 
> Others have covered the swap / inactive memory issue.
> 
> But I'd expect this to be slow, for any new work anyway .. there's
> next to no idle on any CPU.  I'd be asking, what's all of that system
> usage?
> 
this is building ports in the background. Still, used doing this ones a
month, I know the feeling when the ports are updated. This one was
really slow. Hopefully, it was just an unlucky coincidence.

I rebooted meanwhile the machine. It is faster now, I would say, it is
back to normal now. It did not come to its limits since the new start.
It is now on:

FreeBSD 10.3-STABLE #3 r314363

Erich