James Knott
I'm running 15.1 & KDE. One thing I've noticed is swap use increases through time, even though I'm not even using all the real memory. Eventually, it gets to the point where my system bogs down and can become unusable. At the moment, I'm running 13.6 GiB of 15.6 memory and 4.1 of 24 swap. Why should swap be used at all, when there's still a significant amount of free memory?
I looked into this some time ago, and will probably doing so again as I am now reduced to using a system with 1.5G of RAM. When linux detects that you haven't used a program for some time, it will swap it out and use the memory for buffers. The increased use of buffers supposedly makes the system more efficient. How much linux will swap out will depend on swappiness, and also on the amount of swap available. Linux is aiming to have buffers, but also to have free memory in case it suddenly needs to do something. This is why you see it swapping when there is memory available. Whether you change swappiness depends on what you are doing. If you have two programs running and you are occasionally switching between them with alt-tab, then there will be long pauses while it swaps back in the program it swapped out while you were not using it. You can check which programs are using memory by running 'top' and pressing M, then the highest memory users will be at the top. Shared memory doesn't necessarily count though. Most people solve the problem by buying so much memory it doesn't matter. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org