> > > 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. I will try to run free and vmstat when things are going a little nuts and get a better picture of memory and swap usage.... the annoying thing about this problem is that sometimes it works perfectly as expected. I just ran a test... starting at about 1200Mb RAM and 1400Mb swap, I launched X-Plane, Firefox, Opera, Seamonkey, VMWare (running 10.2), and VirtualBox (running WinXP). RAM maxed out and things started swapping with swap going from 1400Mb to 2200Mb - what I would call expected normal behaviour. Exited all the applications, and RAM was released, and some swap was released and it's now sitting at 1572Mb. If I close down everything, log out and log back in, swap usage doesn't move.. or if anything swap use increases slightly on login.now it will never drop below 1572Mb swap until I reboot. I expect that it'll top over 2000Mb in the next 24 hours... most of that while sitting idle. Now the annoying thing about this prob is.... sometimes for no easily discernible reason, during normal use (not the stress test I did above) RAM will not be maxed out, and the system will start paging out to swap... and swap use will go up.. and not be released. eventually swap is maxed out, and the computer basically becomes unusable. Reboot fixes. I am nowhere near an expert on this.. only a vague understanding.. more like a peripheral awareness of the magic going on in this part of my computer.... so... C. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
