Re: Interpreting FreeBSD 'vmstat' output

[Patrick J Okui <pokui at one2net.co.ug>]

On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 21:35, Brian Candler wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I wonder if one of the deep kernel experts on this list can explain to me
> how to interpret the output of 'vmstat' in FreeBSD.
> 
> I have a box here which has 1GB of RAM (running FreeBSD-4.5-RELEASE):
> 
> Mar 19 14:46:15 radius-b-lond /kernel: real memory  = 1073676288 (1048512K bytes)
> Mar 19 14:46:15 radius-b-lond /kernel: avail memory = 1040379904 (1015996K bytes)
> 
> This is what 'vmstat' shows:
<snip>
No idea what vmstat is blabbering about.... had the same problems with
interpreting memory stats so I installed muse...
 
> Also, what does 'Inact' and 'Wired' mean? What is the difference between
> RAM in this state and RAM which is 'Free'?

man muse gives

MUSE(1)                 FreeBSD General Commands Manual               
MUSE(1)

NAME
     Muse - show memory usage data

SYNOPSIS
     muse [-k]

DESCRIPTION
     Muse prints memory statistics in bytes or kilobytes if -k is used. 
     Memory is categorized into:

     o   Active - total memory active

     o   Inactive - total memory inactive

     o   Wired - memory that cannot be paged out

     o   Reserved - memory reserved for deadlock

     o   Cache - memory in the buffer cache queue

     o   Buffer - memory allocated to IO buffer

     o   Total - total memory in the system

     o   Free - free memory in the system

<snip>

HTH
Patrick.
> 
> Thanks...
> 
> Brian.
> 
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-- 
Patrick J Okui
Systems Administrator
One2Net (U) Ltd


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