Hi Perrin -
> > Odd thing #2: (This part seems most bizarre to me.) At 5:15 AM, we run a
> > Perl script that finds and deletes Apache::Session::File session and lock
> > files that are older than 28 days. Usually there are about 50,000 old
> > files that get deleted out of about 2,300,000 total. Almost immediately,
> > free memory on the machine jumps back up to 1.3GB. What's up with that?
>
> Sounds like you're counting the buffers and cache in your "used" memory.
> Depending on what OS you're on, you may want to look at a tool other than
> top. The memory used for buffers and cache will be available to
> applications if they need it.
That's exactly it, thanks for the pointer Perrin! Turns out "free" memory
as reported on Solaris includes the file system cache. On a busy system
it will always look like there's no almost free memory, when in reality
memory used by the file cache gets released immediately when an
application needs it. I found some good general info at:
http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance/vmsizing.pdf
Larry Leszczynski
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
