RAM/Memory resources on 7 STABLE

[Tim Kellers]

My Machine: Dell 2850 PE w/ 12 GB of Ram

www# uname -a
FreeBSD www 7.1-STABLE FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE #2: Tue Jan  6 19:24:57 EST 2009     root at www:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DELL64  amd64

When I boot this machine it usually shows (in top) about 11 G Free in the Mem: line

The machine, in this snippet, has been up for 5 days 22 hours and change and it now shows 1436M free in the Mem: line
I've been watching the number and it has been slowly decreasing over the 5 days since its last boot.  It looks like as the Free line trends down, the Inact value trends up to keep the total Mem used at the installed 12G

I've never noticed this (the slow decline of Free) before on any machine I've had.  Maybe that just means it has happened and I haven't noticed it, but I don't know.

Is anyone familiar with this or if it means trouble or what might be the cause?

Thanks

Tim



last pid: 67240;  load averages:  0.16,  0.14,  0.10                                                                             up 5+22:44:26  12:32:54
109 processes: 1 running, 107 sleeping, 1 zombie
CPU 0:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  1.5% system,  0.0% interrupt, 98.5% idle
CPU 1:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  1.1% system,  0.0% interrupt, 98.9% idle
CPU 2:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  1.1% system,  0.8% interrupt, 98.1% idle
CPU 3:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
Mem: 383M Active, 9507M Inact, 424M Wired, 129M Cache, 214M Buf, 1447M Free
Swap: 2014M Total, 2014M Free