[snipped theory about updatedb/locate/reiserfs causing SWAP use]
"Fred A. Miller"
True, however, it's the ONLY file system I use, and I don't have that problem on any box.
But do you use updatedb and locate on those boxes? (I just threw in the mention of reiserfs because it seems to be much more likely to hang onto the mostly useless directory cache that updatedb fills up. Worse, it appears to do so in a way that looks suspiciously like a memory leak. Here is the memory use for my machine that runs updatedb every night, which I have not used much since last rebooting it and which has practically nothing running on it at the moment: markgray@mmx:~> free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 255388 248264 7124 0 55404 65764 -/+ buffers/cache: 127096 128292 Swap: 530136 28752 501384 markgray@mmx:~> and here is a machine that does NOT run updatedb, with the same amount of memory, that I use very heavily and which is running a lot of memory hungry processes at the moment: markgray@k6:~> free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 255960 239780 16180 0 53752 72572 -/+ buffers/cache: 113456 142504 Swap: 1228944 0 1228944