On Monday 19 November 2007 22:22:54 Clayton wrote:
free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2076040 1182912 893128 0 41784 559888 -/+ buffers/cache: 581240 1494800 Swap: 4192956 1472652 2720304
Yes, this looks familiar. Plenty of memory free, but still lots of swap
That's usually a sign that something big was running, and eating up memory, forcing other things into swap, and then it exited (or crashed), freeing up the memory it used.
Seeing 50% free memory on a linux system that has been running for a while is highly unusual. It should be used for buffers and cache, if for nothing else. It is almost always a sign of the above scenario
True enough. I had been running a few things (Acroread being one) that had been closed just moments before I ran free. Same goes for vmstat... I ran it after things had settled down, not when swap was being loaded up (wasn't thinking...). When the apps were closed, the RAM was freed up (as expected). It is worth noting though, that the 1440Mb of swap has been there for 2 days now. RAM has ranged up and down as I use apps... on a clean boot with only the background fluff running plus KDE and the apps I run on startup there, I see around 1200Mb of RAM allocated (which then fairly rapidly tops out the RAM with buffers and cache stuff). Normal behavior on my setup which has been running the same apps since 10.2 was released was to rarely if ever put anything into swap. Swap would sit at zero for weeks... or longer.
What does /proc/meminfo look like on that machine when this is happening? Anders -- Madness takes its toll -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org