"Amit Kulkarni" wrote:

> When I do some building of kernel or something, a normal top with just 9 
> processes without X reports 307M of 512 Mb free, I saw that the Residual 
> memory (RES) for the swapper, reaper, pagedaemon, pciide0:1, ioflush ( PID's 
> of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ) take up 27M each with the -S system processes option. 
> And the active memory is reported as 130-160M , why the discrepancy ? Any 
> way to prune that buffering and make it report the currently free memory? 
> What do I have to fiddle around with ?

In a nutshell, the memory usage accounting for the system processes is
busted.  Just ignore it for those processes.

Simon.
--
Simon Burge                            <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
NetBSD CDs, Support and Service:    http://www.wasabisystems.com/