Memory-related questions...

[Dron01]

I have situation that semms strange to me.

I'm using FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE (x64), here is the "top" command output:

CPU:  5.4% user,  0.0% nice,  2.1% system,  0.4% interrupt, 92.2% idle
Mem: 4565M Active, 2299M Inact, 657M Wired, 117M Cache, 824M Buf, 259M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 1563M Used, 2533M Free, 38% Inuse

 PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE   C   TIME   WCPU COMMAND
24075 wow        10  44    0  6638M  3911M select  1 642:50 13.77% mangos-world

Can someone plz explain me what is "Inactive" memory and why isn't it cleared and freed in cases when players logout/grids unload?

I also used cactus system to view it graphically and as I can see the memory usage of process is only increasing, but in fact it includes less memory ("RES" field).

So I wonder how can I clear all inactive memory (that in fact is needed only for quicker access to recent data) and make it free...

[Patman128]

Inactive memory is memory reserved by the OS but not being used. Wired memory is memory in use.

In many cases inactive memory was memory that was being used but was freed.

[rilex]

Freed is different than Inactive. Inactive memory has dirty pages (pages that contain data) where as free memory has no dirty pages (no data).