linux-kernel - A plenty of inactive memory, but why?

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Message-ID: <985967.28848.qm@web45110.mail.sp1.yahoo.com>
Date:	Tue, 8 Apr 2008 22:31:16 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Andreas Grimm <agrimm61@...oo.com>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: A plenty of inactive memory, but why?

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 (that's the definition of inactive memory afaik)?

 OS: SLES 10 SP1
 Kernel : 2.6.16.27-0.9-bigsmp

 Thanks in advance.

 Andreas Grimm

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