This is not the problem. We know what is the purpose of swap data. It is swaping when there is more than suffiecient memory to do so. There is disk activity on the swap disk (I have a seperate disk for faster access) even when there is enough memory to suit my request and more.
It is simply swapping when it shouldn't.
Opening Mozilla, Opera, Netscape, DrJava, jEdit, Emacs, PrBoom, XBubbles, and Nautilus at the same time on a 233Mhz machine should fill up the memory (160Mb) but instead it has decided to use the swap disk for a measly 50Mb which I do have in RAM!!
This is definitely an FAQ.
In short, FreeBSD manages swap space differently than does Linux or other systems. In particular, FreeBSD will copy data to swap preemptively in order to fulfill future memory requests more quickly. (By copying the data to swap now in the background, it can avoid stalling a future memory request because those blocks can simply be reallocated without waiting on the disk at the time the request is made.)
If your system is spending a lot of time moving data to and from swap when it is not memory-starved, or if it is stalling memory allocations that it should be able to fulfill from free RAM, that's a concern. Otherwise, it is perfectly normal and expected to see a low level of swap activity even when memory is not completely full.
Tim Kientzle
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