From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754433AbYDIJON (ORCPT ); Wed, 9 Apr 2008 05:14:13 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752880AbYDIJN7 (ORCPT ); Wed, 9 Apr 2008 05:13:59 -0400 Received: from wf-out-1314.google.com ([209.85.200.174]:38429 "EHLO wf-out-1314.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752336AbYDIJN6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 9 Apr 2008 05:13:58 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=message-id:date:from:to:subject:mime-version:content-type:content-transfer-encoding:content-disposition; b=TLOzDgBQz5rTxU4HMOZXLIMOtQfHpb7RStHFa9wWdfAuRPpIimn6Zsh/qBz6vZS27nSBYBYdZqVfPFAcco5sNlVuM467YNDujKcqdPrgXj0BP/+qN9vKzDWKNCYVvS2PR9JkD3mgQFCuju9HZYBfq6ihNMe6QP1KciaFenfg9XM= Message-ID: Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2008 11:13:56 +0200 From: "Andreas Grimm" To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: VM - a plenty of inactive memory MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello everybody, i got a weird problem with one of my servers. It's a Intel SR2500AL with 32GB of RAM. Looking at the memory usage of the system, something is going totally wrong. The crucial numbers from /proc/meminfo are: MemTotal: 33265916 kB MemFree: 416168 kB Inactive: 24630428 kB (24GB? whooaaa) Another system with only 16GB, same amount of users and load, shows a more normal behaviour: MemTotal: 16619808 kB MemFree: 6912676 kB Inactive: 1774364 kB Why does the 32GB-System have this plenty of inactive memory. Is there a way to find out, what the kernel is holding in readiness (that's the definition of inactive memory afaik)? OS: SLES 10 SP1 Kernel : 2.6.16.27-0.9-bigsmp Thanks in advance. Andreas Grimm