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Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:31:00 -0600
From: Robert Hancock <hancockr@shaw.ca>
Subject: Re: Plenty of inactive memory
In-reply-to: <fa.HIr5TAepu3mcAI6oLfBPL3wGwss@ifi.uio.no>
To: Andreas Grimm <agrimm61@gmail.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Andreas Grimm wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> 
> i got a weird problem with one of my servers. It's a Intel SR2500AL
> with 32GB of RAM.
> Looking at the memory usage of the system, something is going totally
> wrong. The crucial numbers from /proc/meminfo are:
> 
> MemTotal: 33265916 kB
> MemFree: 416168 kB
> Inactive: 24630428 kB (24GB? whooaaa)
> 
> Another system with only 16GB, same amount of users and load, shows a
> more normal behaviour:
> 
> MemTotal: 16619808 kB
> MemFree: 6912676 kB
> Inactive: 1774364 kB
> 
> Why does the 32GB-System have this plenty of inactive memory. Is there
> a way to find out, what the kernel is holding in readiness?
> 
> OS: SLES 10 SP1
> Kernel : 2.6.16.27-0.9-bigsmp
> 
> Thanks in advance.

Doesn't sound unreasonable that most of that memory is not in active 
use, depending on the applications..