RAM/Memory resources on 7 STABLE

[Lowell Gilbert]

Tim Kellers <kellers at njit.edu> writes:

> 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


See the FreeBSD FAQ entry titled "Why does top show very little free
memory even when I have very few programs running?".

-- 
Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area
		http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/