Please explain FreeBSD 8.0/ZFS memory usage patterns

[Benjamin Lutz]

On Tuesday 12 January 2010 15:35:12 Ivan Voras wrote:
> How do you get those categories: kern, proc? I suppose proc could be sum
> of resident sizes of processes (aka "RES" in top) and kern could be
> sysctl vm.kmem_size?

yes, exactly. kern is kvm.kmem_size, proc is the sum of RSS memory of all 
processes (including kernel processes), active and wired are the value from 
top, arc is the ZFS ARC.

> > In the first half of the graph, there's a torrent download running, which
> > I assume causes the large fluctuations in memory usage. However, memory
> > usage
> 
> Large fluctuations in which category? The ARC? (since "proc" doesn't
> fluctuate much).

well, wired seems to move with the ARC. But why does active memory move so 
much? As you pointed out, my processes don't change that much.

Cheers
Benjamin