> inactive, cache, and buffer are all different types of "buffer".
That is my understanding as well. > I'm fairly sure that inactive is memory used by program code. When the > program terminates, the memory is marked as inactive, which means the > next time the program starts the code can simply be moved back to > active and the program need not be reloaded from disk. I think non-program code can also be "inactive". For example, top memory output before: Mem: 337M Active, 1455M Inact, 407M Wired, 352K Cache, 214M Buf, 1745M Free and after: find /usr/src -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cat > /dev/null 2>&1 Mem: 348M Active, 1905M Inact, 402M Wired, 912K Cache, 214M Buf, 1288M Free I am also not sure exactly what constitutes each of these. I only know what the top man page says. And for Buf it says: Buf: number of pages used for BIO-level disk caching I'm not entirely sure what "BIO-level disk caching" is, but it is apparently NOT the caching of filesystem data. Josh _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"