Do you feel it is hurting your performance?? Somewhere in Linux there is probably a tool which will show you the 'page rate' or really the 'swap rate'. That's the *ONLY* thing that counts. If you're not swapping at a good rate, then it's not hurting you.
vmstat will tell you that. Do a 'vmstat 1 10' and look at the 'si' and 'so' fields. As a matter of interest I ran vmstat and then jumped to one of my otherwise completely unused virtual terminals and logged in. Sure enough: procs memory swap io system cpu r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id 0 0 0 32948 36276 348880 264708 0 0 0 0 110 423 2 1 97 1 0 0 32880 35948 348880 264724 96 0 112 28 117 457 2 2 96 1 0 0 32880 35952 348880 264724 0 0 0 0 104 409 0 3 97 96 pages suddenly swapped in - probably the only swap activity the machine has seen for hours. So my guess in my other post appears correct: the kernel has swapped out those unused virtual terminal processes and is using the memory for something more useful. Well, that was moderately interesting. Back to work.... :o) -- "...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE ...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003