Birbla

Discussion summary

Users discussed FreeBSD's memory management, caching, and heuristics for measuring used RAM, with some mentioning recent fixes and tools like zfs-stats and btop.

What the discussion says

  • Memory usage can be inaccurate due to caching and heuristics.
  • Tools like zfs-stats and btop help monitor system internals.
  • There is ongoing work to improve memory measurement accuracy.
“Used memory for the system is always total minus available.”
— drdexebtjl
“The system knows what is using every page, but measuring it precisely is complex.”
— toast0

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  • Hacker News
  • Great job on getting the fixes merged!
    by efxhoy
  • I wonder if these btop fixes got into the standard ports collection? Or even upstream?

    I like the command for viewing the ARC cache size, never knew that. It's only 2GB on my system (of 64GB RAM).

    by wolvoleo
  • the end struck me - a picture of an os book. I wonder if students these days retain their books after college, or do they get returned as a rental?
    by m463
  • Thank you for such a quality post.
    by duendefm
  • Interesting post, it made me wonder. At one time FreeBSD swap usage/logic was far better than what Linux did. Is that still the case ?
    by jmclnx
  • If you like this kind of post, you might like this “htop explained” post.

    https://peteris.rocks/blog/htop/

    by tiffanyh
  • As for the “unauthorized” sign:

    Book publishers used to print India/SEA-only editions of books only sold in those countries, significantly cheaper than in the US or Europe. Then a Thai guy realized that this would be a good business opportunity: buy cheaper books and then import them to the US. Wiley brought him to court, went to the SCOTUS, Wiley lost the case. So they ended up printing cheaper edition books.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....

    Mind you "price discrimination" like this still exist in the digital world where locality is easier to be enforced. For example Steam has extensive regional pricing across countries so the same game can be significantly cheaper in Russia, India, Brazil etc. compared to US or EU

    An example: https://steamdb.info/app/413150/

    https://partner.steamgames.com/pricing/explorer

    https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/pricing/currencies

    by haunter

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