# Memory Usage



## JakkFrosted (Aug 4, 2013)

I just installed FreeBSD on a server a few days ago, have the Webmin panel running and a few ultra-low-traffic Wordpress sites. Over 6 GB of RAM is being used. 16 GB of RAM is installed on the system. Is this normal? I'm sort of thinking that the OS will hold a % of memory rather than a minimum amount, hence the sizable wired usage ("wired" is new to me).


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## Crivens (Aug 4, 2013)

"Wired" means that the memory is pinned down and not swapable. I would presume you are using ZFS?

In that case, most of these 6 GB are the ARC cache of ZFS. This is normal, the memory will be released when free memory is going low. But swapping the file system cache out would be a bad idea, so that memory is marked as non-swapable.


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## throAU (Aug 5, 2013)

If it is indeed ZFS (and it sure looks like it, though I wasn't aware the installer supported install to ZFS in FreeBSD yet), I'd suggest on reading the documentation for ZFS (which details things like the ARC cache, etc.) to ensure you don't shoot yourself in the foot.


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