# What up with inactive memory usage



## bojinov (Mar 4, 2012)

Guys,

*C*heck the attached screenshot from Munin. Can't get why so much memory is allocated. Should I be worried or something?

Thanx
Momchi


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## bojinov (Mar 4, 2012)

Here it is


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## Uniballer (Mar 4, 2012)

I wouldn't worry.  It's not like it keeps growing/churning.  And the "inactive" part (blue in your graph) is caching previously used pages in case they are reclaimed (e.g. program images, shared libraries, etc.) before they are needed for some other purpose.  The system will free them and give them to a process if they are really needed.  This gives a big performance benefit for most systems.


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## gkontos (Mar 4, 2012)

It doesn't look bad, are you swapping a lot?

Generally speaking, free memory is bad memory. BTW are you performing a lot of I/O in UFS?


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## bojinov (Mar 4, 2012)

Thank you Uniballer.

Gkontos, I do have swap, but the graph for the swap usage is empty. 0 in, 0 out.
That is one of the reasons I think I might have a problem. though I only use 1.5 GB of RAM and the server has like 8 GB, so why use it right?
As for the I/O, I don't think so, there is a single jail, besides the base OS. *B*ut no virtualization or file serving.


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## wblock@ (Mar 4, 2012)

A machine with plenty of memory and no need for swap, the slowest kind of memory, is not using swap.  Why do you think that is a problem?


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## bojinov (Mar 4, 2012)

Hi wblock@,

I was considering a leakage and since some of that memory will be taken away from this server, I*'*ve decided that it won't hurt asking you guys.

Over all I'm more than happy with the memory consumption, considering all the things running on that box.


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## wblock@ (Mar 4, 2012)

It really looks fine.  Note how everything levels off at the end of the graph.  If there were a leak, it would keep climbing.


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## bojinov (Mar 4, 2012)

The server room experiences power outage every now and then  *N*ot much of a server room anyway. *T*he RAID array degrades after every outage and I was concerned about data corruption. *O*therwise that box has served me well for the past 4 years.


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## gkontos (Mar 5, 2012)

bojinov said:
			
		

> The server room experiences power outage every now and then  *N*ot much of a server room anyway. *T*he RAID array degrades after every outage and I was concerned about data corruption. *O*therwise that box has served me well for the past 4 years.



That should not happen! What type of RAID are you using?


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## bojinov (Mar 5, 2012)

RAID0 for the OS.


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## gkontos (Mar 5, 2012)

bojinov said:
			
		

> RAID0 for the OS.



You do realize that RAID0 (striping) is a high risk solution, meaning if you lose one disk then you lose the full OS?

RAID0 is used mainly on application demanding heavy DISK I/O operations at data we don't care to lose because we constantly backup. IMO unless you are doing some video editing, don't use RAID0. 

Best Regards,
George


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## jem (Mar 5, 2012)

gkontos said:
			
		

> You do realize that RAID0 (stripping) is a high risk solution, meaning you if loose one disk then you loose the full OS.



In fact, it doubles your chance of data loss compared to using only a single disk.  You've now got two devices that could fail, either of which would cause loss of your whole RAID 0 stripe.


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## kpa (Mar 6, 2012)

RAID0 is also used by leet gamer kids so they can brag about how quickly their machine boots


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## bojinov (Mar 6, 2012)

*N*ow now guys .. that was a typo .. actually it wasn't
I meant the backup kind of RAID. RAID1 I suppose.

I configured my server. It was ages ago and YES *I**'*m a heavy windows user and barely have anything to do with hardware.
YES I assembled my server from ebay parts, so I*'*m not surprised I have problems with it.

The fun part is that I find FreeBSD easier to configure to run as a server than any linux or windows.


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## Crivens (Mar 7, 2012)

kpa said:
			
		

> RAID0 is also used by leet gamer kids so they can brag about how quickly their machine reboots



There, fixed it for you


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