Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Free memory level in 2.6.16? | From | Steve Bergman <> | Date | Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:48:47 -0500 |
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Due to some problems I was having with the CentOS4.4 kernel, I just moved a box (x86 with 4GB ram) to 2.6.16.29 from kernel.org.
All is well, but I am curious about one thing. This is a fairly memory hungry box, serving about 40 gnome desktops via xdmcp. All VM settings are at the default. Swappiness=60, min_free_kbytes=3831.
However, it seems to seek out about 150MB for the level of free memory that it maintains. Typically I see somewhere between 100MB an 500MB in swap, buffers+cache is about 500MB, and 150MB is free.
If I cat from /dev/md0 to /dev/null, the free memory does go down, to 25MB or so, but then I can watch as it seeks out about 150MB of free memory.
To me, free memory is wasted memory. Is this a bug or a feature?
Thanks for any enlightenment.
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