8Gb RAM but only 250 free !

[valesan]

why my NAS have only 250-300 Mb RAM Free from my 8Gb installed ?

nas description on my signature ;)

 

[warri]

That is normal, ZFS is taking all the RAM is can get to cache stuff. It will automatically manage and clean up if it's needed.

Also, notice that most of the "used" RAM is taken up by inactive RAM (about 4 GB), which AFAIK means that there is still old stuff in the RAM which isn't used anymore and will be cleaned away as soon as new space in RAM is needed. So it's effectively free RAM available for new processes.

 

[valesan]

Thanks, so inactive is also free ;)

 

[jgreco]

No, inactive is more like the amount that the system could possibly operate without while not taking a significant hit in performance. In the meantime, it's cache and other useful stuff.

Put a different way, if you bought 8GB of RAM for your system, wouldn't you want your system to try to make some use of it?

 

[valesan]

sorry to carry on this post, after installing the new 8.0.3 MULTIMEDIA p1 I find this situation:



Is this normal?
because almost 6Gb of wired memory?

 

[peterh]

Yes it perfectly normal. Memory not used is a waste
( and as jgreco said, inactive memory is "used but easy to reclaim if needed"

I think freebsd.org has a good description of memory allocation and usage in their documentation,and
it's one of the really strong points with freebsd.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/arch-handbook/vm.html