Re: wired memory

[Chuck Silvers <chuq%chuq.com@localhost>]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 11:40:08AM +0000, Patrick Welche wrote:
> My 4 Nov -current/amd64 build box seems to be building slowly, with a lot
> of "biowait", e.g. watching the RES of a cc1plus slowly crawl up to SIZE
> at around 3M per 5s.
> 
> Is 10G of "Wired" normal? (32G RAM + 64G swap)
> (lots of malloc(9) and no free(9)?)

kernel memory usage is not reported as "wired" memory.


> Memory: 3235M Act, 115M Inact, 10G Wired, 75M Exec, 2860M File, 2800M Free
> Swap: 64G Total, 11G Used, 53G Free

no, 10GB wired memory out of 32GB total RAM is not a typical situation.
could you send me the output of "ps aux" and "vmstat -m" ?

with 11GB of swap in use, it's not surprising that the system would be
very slow.


> it is "just" building...
> 
> Could kern.maxfiles = 108928 be an issue? (3404 default below)

do you mean that on the system that is slow, kern.maxfiles is 108928?
that doesn't seem overly large for 32GB RAM.

I'm not sure what you mean by "3404 default below".


> Just looked at another amd64 box for comparison (also building - no swap):
> 
> Memory: 15G Act, 3820K Inact, 16M Wired, 44M Exec, 14G File, 135G Free
> Swap: 

this system has a lot more RAM and most of it isn't even used,
so I would expect this system to perform much better than the first one.

-Chuck