In <49C12F5E.7040306@cox.net>, John E. Perry wrote:
PS: ksensors says I have only 796M of my 2G ram in use, and 676M of my 2G swap in use. Why should any swap be in use?
Memory pressure at some point may have caused things to swap out. It's extra work to remove something from swap before absolutely necessary, so once you've gone into swap you'll have some in use for the remainder of the boot, probably. Even if a page in swap is needed, it isn't removed from swap as soon as it is in RAM. Instead, the kernel waits until the RAM page is written to before invalidating the swap page. This way, if memory pressure increase again, no actual writes to swap have to occur to swap that page out. For this reason, the pages containing nothing but configuration data for long- running processes will generally stay in swap until that process dies once they are swapped out. I *think* it is possible for requests to allocate buffer/cache memory (file system operations) to cause pages to swap out, but that's rather rare if it can happen at all. If it truly bothers you to have stuff in swap, you can use a quick swapoff/swapon to force the swap to be expired. (Linux is very smart about memory management. If you are using swap, there's probably a good reason.) -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/