RE: Broken memory management on system with no swap

David wrote:
> ``Inactive'' just means that the page just hasn't been 
> accessed for a while and is a candidtate for replacement.  
> However, on a system without swap, the system has nowhere to 
> send the page if it is dirty.  The only pages that can always 
> be discarded and reused are those in the ``Cache'' and 
> ``Free'' categories.
> 
> So the bottom line is that you really are running out of memory.

Ah! That was not clear to me from reading the VM docs. It now appears
that the culprit is GBDE. Copying a 700MB file from the GBDE partition
to another drive causes the inactive memory to increase by roughly the
file size. Within about a minute after the copy has completed, the
inactive memory drops from over 700MB to about 500MB and remains there.
Which would explain why the server is running out of memory. Unmounting
the GBDE partition reduces the inactive memory down to 130MB, but still
does not appear to recover all memory used by the copying process.

--Lucky