On Mon, Apr 16, 2007 at 04:16:51PM +0200, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> Running top, is it possible for the numbers on the memory line to exceed 
> the available physical memory?
> I'm talking about active, inactive, wired, exec, file and free.
> Of these, if I just sum active, inactive, file and free on one of my 
> machines, it definitely exceeds the available memory I have, which 
> surprised me. Actually, just summing active and file results in more 
> memory than I physically have.

(active + inactive + wired + free) should always be less than
the total memory in the machine.

(exec + file + anon) should always be less than the total memory,
though the anon pages are not reported by top.

these are separate ways of categorizing physical pages,
and adding counters from both sets doesn't make sense.

-Chuck