Question about memory usage in 2.4 vs 2.2

Josh Grebe (squash@primary.net)
Tue, 20 Mar 2001 11:01:52 -0600 (CST)


Greetings,

I have a server farm made of identical hardware running pop3 and imap mail
functions. recently, we upgraded all the machines to kernel 2.4.2, but we
noticed that according to free, our memory utilization went way up. Here
is the output of free on the 2.4.2 machine:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513192 492772 20420 0 1684 263188
-/+ buffers/cache: 227900 285292
Swap: 819304 540 818764

On the 2.2..18 machine:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 517256 351280 165976 19920 82820 186836
-/+ buffers/cache: 81624 435632
Swap: 819304 0 819304

Doing the math, the 2.4 machine is using 44% of available memory, while
the 2.2 is using only about 14%.

Here are the contents of /proc/meminfo on 2.4:
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 525508608 517480448 8028160 0 1138688 282091520
Swap: 838967296 552960 838414336
MemTotal: 513192 kB
MemFree: 7840 kB
MemShared: 0 kB
Buffers: 1112 kB
Cached: 275480 kB
Active: 254876 kB
Inact_dirty: 18880 kB
Inact_clean: 2836 kB
Inact_target: 48 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 513192 kB
LowFree: 7840 kB
SwapTotal: 819304 kB
SwapFree: 818764 kB

on 2.2:
total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
Mem: 529670144 366837760 162832384 22945792 84807680 194367488
Swap: 838967296 0 838967296
MemTotal: 517256 kB
MemFree: 159016 kB
MemShared: 22408 kB
Buffers: 82820 kB
Cached: 189812 kB
SwapTotal: 819304 kB
SwapFree: 819304 kB

These machines are dual P2-400's, with 512M ECC ram, adaptec 2940, and
dual intel etherexpress pro 100 cards.

I also tried 2.4.2-ac20 with similar results.

Am I missing something here? I'd really like to move the farm back up to
2.4 series.

Thanks,

Josh

---
Josh Grebe
Senior Unix Systems Administrator
Primary Network, an MPower Company
http://www.primary.net

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