# Inact & Free memory ..



## suzanne (Jan 4, 2010)

hi ,

Although very little practice very little free mem. What is written in the inact, 8 gb amd64. Should be more free memory?

real memory  = 8589934592 (8192 MB)
avail memory = 8239775744 (7858 MB)


```
CPU:     % user,     % nice,     % system,     % interrupt,     % idle
Mem: 449M Active, [B]4075M Inact[/B], 1779M Wired, 176M Cache, 827M Buf, [B]1419M Free[/B]
Swap: 2048M Total, 2048M Free
```


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## Alt (Jan 4, 2010)

Dont worry, FreeBSD manages it beautiful way, for you =)


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## SirDice (Jan 4, 2010)

This is a bit about OS-X but it's probably the same on FreeBSD:


> Inactive memory is memory that has recently been used by an application that is no longer running. OSX keeps track of what this is and what it belonged to because of the idea of temporal locality, the idea being that if you opened an application you are somewhat likely to do so again and if the memory is still labeled, the application can start very quickly. In the absence of sufficient free memory, inactive memory will be reclaimed by another running application that needs memory.


http://lutzrfrank.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/wired-active-inactive-and-free-physical-memory-ram/


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## phoenix (Jan 5, 2010)

Unless you see Swap usage go way up, you don't really have to worry about RAM usage.  In FreeBSD "free" memory is wasted memory.  It can (and should) be used to cache files accessed on disk, or memory from recently used apps, or buffers, or whatever.  Why leave it free and unused when it can be used to speed things up?


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## suzanne (Jan 14, 2010)

Mem: 73M Active, 19M Inact, 7583M Wired, 211M Cache, 827M Buf, 13M Free

13M free ,
very slow computer


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## DutchDaemon (Jan 14, 2010)

There's nothing indicating it's down to RAM, and I think [cmd=]swapinfo[/cmd] won't show a lot of activity either. Look in [cmd=]top[/cmd] to see what's (apparently) hogging your CPU. Maybe something's causing a lot of interrupts, or a hanging process is eating 100% CPU.


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