Understanding the Memory Generated Report

[David R]

Still working towards getting my FreeNAS box all situated and if I am reading this right...I'm out of memory - how can that be?

I have 32GB ECC Ram and 16 TB of storage space.

Am I reading this graph correctly?

Thanks

 

[Mirfster]

No FreeNas will always try to use as much RAM as possible. Who wants perfectly good fast RAM just sitting around idle anyways. :)

 

[nightshade00013]

Yep, having that memory show as full means it has pre loaded files for faster reading and reuse. Flip over to the ZFS tab and you will see the ARC and information pertaining to it the higher the hit percentages the better the system is doing. FreeNAS will unload old things from memory that it does not expect to use again for a while (i.e. the pron you watched last thursday) and load something new into it's place like maybe some family photos or home movies that you just started opening. The system tries to pre load files into memory this is especially nice with a movie since it reads the whole movie from the pool which might take 90 seconds and plays it back from memory rather than being like windows and reading small portions at a time as you play the same file.

 

[Ericloewe]

The system tries to pre load files into memory this is especially nice with a movie since it reads the whole movie from the pool which might take 90 seconds and plays it back from memory rather than being like windows and reading small portions at a time as you play the same file.

Well, Windows also caches frequently-used files in RAM. It's not as sophisticated as ZFS' ARC, but memory doesn't go to waste. Unless you have a crapton of RAM and reasonably fast SSDs - in that case, Windows likes to leave some 4+GB of RAM free (out of 16GB).