Tracking down what has inact pages locked up

[John Baldwin]

On Sunday, March 16, 2014 4:36:06 pm Karl Denninger wrote:
> Is there a reasonable way to determine who or what has that memory 
> locked up -- and thus why the vm system is not demoting that space into 
> the cache bucket so it can be freed (which, if my understanding is 
> correct, should be happening long before now!)

I have a hackish thing (for 8.x, might work on 10.x) to let you figure out
what is using up RAM.  This should perhaps go into the base system at some
point.

Grab the bits at http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/vm_objects/

You will want to build the kld first and use 'make load' to load it.  It adds
a new sysctl that dumps info about all the VM objects in the system.  You can
then build the 'vm_objects' tool and run it.  It can take a while to run if
you have NFS mounts, so I typically save its output to a file first and then
use sort on the results.  sort -n will show you the largest consumer of RAM,
sort -n -k 3 will show you the largest consumer of inactive pages.  Note
that 'df' and 'ph' objects are anonymous, and that filename paths aren't
always reliable, but this can still be useful.

-- 
John Baldwin