Re: Best OS & Configuration for Dual Xeon w/4GB & Adaptec RAID 2200S - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Jim C. Nasby
Subject Re: Best OS & Configuration for Dual Xeon w/4GB & Adaptec RAID 2200S
Date
Msg-id 20060321103219.GD15742@pervasive.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Best OS & Configuration for Dual Xeon w/4GB & Adaptec RAID 2200S  (Vivek Khera <vivek@khera.org>)
Responses Re: Best OS & Configuration for Dual Xeon w/4GB & Adaptec  (Mark Kirkwood <markir@paradise.net.nz>)
List pgsql-performance
On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 02:15:22PM -0500, Vivek Khera wrote:
> I think FreeBSD has a hard upper limit on the total ram it will use
> for disk cache.  I haven't been able to get reliable, irrefutable,
> answers about it, though.

It does not. Any memory in the inactive queue is effectively your 'disk
cache'. Pages start out in the active queue, and if they aren't used
fairly frequently they will move into the inactive queue. From there
they will be moved to the cache queue, but only if the cache queue falls
below a certain threshold, because in order to go into the cache queue
the page must be marked clean, possibly incurring a write to disk. AFAIK
pages only go into the free queue if they have been completely released
by all objects that were referencing them, so it's theoretically
posisble for that queue to go to 0.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461

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