What is the significance of having high pgfree/s on a linux system?

Question

I am seeing high pgfree/s values in sar for an application. Generally is this an issue I should be concerned about? If so, what is generally the cause, spending time lots of time in GC?

Answer 1

The only thing I could find about sar that may shed some light on your question is from Redhat. However I can not see anything there that would relate to garbage collection.

Answer 2

It depends on what your machine is doing as to whether it's an issue. pgfree/s is the number of pages the kernel is putting on the free list per second. The free list is where the kernel tracks unallocated memory. So if you're doing a lot of memory allocation/deallocation (like by creating and destroying a lot of processes), then it should be fine. More info about memory and the free list can be found here.