Continuously increasing memory usage since the update to 2.6

[dschmitz]

@steveits Thank you! Have installed the patch and configured the system tunable. Will post back if continue to have issues.

[kprovost]

@dschmitz Steve's already pointed you at a way to have the UI show lower memory use, but I wanted to reinforce the point that what your 'top' screenshot shows is not a problem.

It does show that the majority of RAM is in use, but if you look one line lower you can see that 13 out of the 14 GB of wired memory is used by the ARC (ZFS's buffer cache).
That's a good thing. It means that the memory you paid for is doing stuff, rather than sitting around burning electrons for nothing. Once memory is needed for other things (such as pf states, or installing packages or any of the thousands of other things the system does) the ARC will release that memory.

As a general rule, memory usage on modern operating systems is much more complicated than you think it is, even if you take this rule into account.