free memory keeps going down on 5.4-release

[Jonathan Horne]

On Monday 06 November 2006 11:08, Roselyn Lee wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're running freebsd 5-4 release and notice that an idle system's free
> memroy keeps decreasing.  The system has 1 GB memory and the free mem
> starts at ~700M and goes down steadily until it hits 2M and stays there. 
> After that bringing up more apps on the system doesn't seem to make the
> free memory any smaller.  I checked top and vmstat -m, vmstat -z and can't
> see where all that memory is going.  Does freebsd use memory for disk
> caching that is not accounted for in these stats?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> Roselyn
>

not to worry, the less free memory, the better.  the memory that you cannot 
see where it goes, is likely cached for application, and would be freed if 
something else really needed it.  the less free memory you see, the quicker 
your server can react to a request.

unless your server is getting into significant swap usage, i would consider 
little to no free memory available a good thing.

cheers,
jonathan