[Zope] Zope and memory usage

[Douwe Osinga]

Hi,

I'm getting memory errors running zope on BSD. I have looked at the
archives; applied the relevant patches, but to no avail.

My machine has 1 Gbyte of memory. During normal operation, top shows
something like this:

  last pid:  7030;  load averages:  0.52,  0.46,  0.35   up 10+13:27:06
06:51:44
  5 processes:   1 running, 4 sleeping
  CPU states: 15.6% user,  0.0% nice,  3.1% system, 15.2% interrupt, 66.1%
idle
  Mem: 193M Active, 545M Inact, 203M Wired, 37M Cache, 111M Buf, 22M Free
  Swap: 2048M Total, 21M Used, 2027M Free, 1% Inuse

    PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
   6458 zope       2   0   133M   128M poll     3:38 24.16% 24.16% python
   6460 zope      28   0  1864K  1008K RUN      0:00  0.00%  0.00% top


As you see, there is 22M marked as free and a whopping 545 as Inactive. Now,
during
normal operation, the 22M will go down until it hits zero and give me memory
errors,
but the 545M will be still around that number. As I understand it, inactive
memory
are pages that can be flushed by the OS if needed. Why doesn't this happen?
Or is it
something else?

Douwe Osinga
http://douweosinga.com