Re: where did all my memory go?

From: Brooks Davis <brooks_at_one-eyed-alien.net>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:17:16 -0800
On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 12:12:10PM -0800, Sean McNeil wrote:
> With a system built yesterday on my amd64, I had plenty of memory
> showing as free when the system completely started up.  Even after
> intense usage I showed lots of free memory in top.  Over night at some
> point all my memory is no longer free but inactive.  Is there anything
> wrong here or is this expected behavior?  ps doesn't show any serious
> usage by any particular process.  Also, if disk caches or something were
> taking up the memory, I would expect it to have shown a lot earlier.

On a system that has been up for any significant time, free memory
should be very small since free memory is wasted.  My guess is that it
is disk cache and that one of the nightly jobs accessed enough stuff to
fill it.

-- Brooks

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Received on Wed Feb 16 2005 - 19:16:35 UTC

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