On Fri, Aug 27, 2004 at 02:01:15PM +0100, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 13:24, Geoff Wing wrote:
> I have a machine with 64M of ram.  The kernel 'processes' (as shown in
> top) used to take about 4M of that, maybe less until late last year. 
> These days top shows the kernel hogging 18M of ram at present.  It never
> drops, even when the machine starts thrashing.


the big memory users in your data are:

> Memory statistics by type                           Type  Kern
>          Type  InUse MemUse HighUse  Limit Requests Limit Limit Size(s)
>       UVM amap  1348   194K   1835K  4301K580397389    0     0  16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048,4096,8192,16384,32768,65536,131072,262144,524288
>           ttys   566   368K    368K  4301K      566    0     0  128,1024

neither of these is fs-related, and neither seems excessive.


> Memory resource pool statistics
> Name        Size Requests Fail Releases Pgreq Pgrel Npage Hiwat Minpg Maxpg Idle
> pvepl         16 2372304597  0 2372295804  97    32    65    84     3   inf    0
> l2ptppl     1024    50092    0    49895  3300  3239    61   100     4   inf    0
> ffsinopl     176 90990308    0 90982870  6064  5739   325   335     0   inf    0
> dino1pl      128 90990308    0 90982870  4363  4122   241   249     0   inf    0
> sigapl      2052 18440743    0 18440706  9098  9041    57    64     0   inf   20
> ncachepl      84 89535830    0 89528971  3251  3101   150   161     0   inf    6
> vnodepl      164  4820406    0  4812947  1667  1355   312   322     0   inf    0

the maximum number of vnodes the system will allocate is controlled by
the sysctl node "kern.maxvnodes".  the management of memory used for
vnodes and the like hasn't changed in a long time.  even if all of the
memory used for these were freed, it would only return about 4MB to the
system.   this doesn't seem to be the cause of the jump in memory usage
that you've seen.


and I'll include all of the pools for cached fs metadata:

> bufpl        120 48360022    0 48356406  7803  7693   110   123     0   inf    0
> buf1k       1024  2099845    0  2097186  4417  4373    44    49     1   inf    0
> buf2k       2048   325376    0   325261  2819  2815     4    26     1   inf    0
> buf4k       4096   109667    0   109636  2538  2535     3    10     1   inf    0
> buf8k       8192  1814843    0  1814033 36652 36523   129   232     1   inf    1

this is a very modest memory usage, only 1.1 MB.


> In use 14733K, total allocated 17724K; utilization 83.1%

if I add up the "Npage" column, I only get 1731 pages, which is 6924KB
(I'm assuming this is a pc).  where's the other 10MB hiding?

-Chuck