linux-kernel - VM - a plenty of inactive memory

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Message-ID: <cf40c6a90804090213u55491ceay9b211d75d74dc29c@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Wed, 9 Apr 2008 11:13:56 +0200
From:	"Andreas Grimm" <agrimm61@...il.com>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: VM - a plenty of inactive memory

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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