Solved WIRED (Memory)

poorandunlucky

poorandunlucky

So earlier I ran top -CSHIi to see where things were at, and memory was something like 500 MB free, and 11 G of "wired" memory...

What's that?

Then I exited out of everything to the point where I was just logged-in with the root account on one terminal running sh, and nothing else but normal system processes, and I still only had about 3.8 G of available RAM out of 16 G...

I rebooted, but otherwise, how do I free "wired" memory?
 
Unused memory is useless memory. On a used system almost all memory will be constantly in use. Most of this however is taken up by various caches (process, file, etc). These caches will automatically get removed if there's an application with more pressing memory requirements. Wired memory however is locked and cannot be swapped out. This wired memory is used by the kernel, kernel modules and the kernel heap. I suspect you are using ZFS, ARC is counted as wired memory.


https://wiki.freebsd.org/Memory
 
SirDice said:
Unused memory is useless memory. On a used system almost all memory will be constantly in use. Most of this however is taken up by various caches (process, file, etc). These caches will automatically get removed if there's an application with more pressing memory requirements. Wired memory however is locked and cannot be swapped out. This wired memory is used by the kernel, kernel modules and the kernel heap. I suspect you are using ZFS, ARC is counted as wired memory.


https://wiki.freebsd.org/Memory
Click to expand...

Several builds were getting segmentation faults... is that why so much memory was wired with nothing running? Howcome it didn't get freed? How could I have freed it without rebooting, do you know?
 
As wired memory is used by the kernel it would be the kernel that needs to release it. Builds typically happen in userspace though and would therefor use up user memory, not wired memory.

But more importantly, is this system running on ZFS? ZFS's ARC is counted as wired memory. This should be released though if there's another application that needs that memory. You could try limiting your ARC usage and see if that improves things.
 
SirDice said:
As wired memory is used by the kernel it would be the kernel that needs to release it. Builds typically happen in userspace though and would therefor use up user memory, not wired memory.

But more importantly, is this system running on ZFS? ZFS's ARC is counted as wired memory. This should be released though if there's another application that needs that memory. You could try limiting your ARC usage and see if that improves things.
Click to expand...

Well that thing sure had made itself at home...

I'll check again in a little while see if that was that... thanks...
 
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