From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750712AbWJEHrv (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Oct 2006 03:47:51 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750714AbWJEHrv (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Oct 2006 03:47:51 -0400 Received: from eastrmmtao05.cox.net ([68.230.240.34]:24793 "EHLO eastrmmtao05.cox.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750712AbWJEHru (ORCPT ); Thu, 5 Oct 2006 03:47:50 -0400 Subject: Free memory level in 2.6.16? From: Steve Bergman To: Linux Kernel Content-Type: text/plain Date: Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:48:47 -0500 Message-Id: <1160034527.23009.7.camel@localhost> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.6.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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.