Shae Tan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I don't understand this part. If my memory is not fully utilized, why > eat a part of the swap? I thought swap is only utilized when no > primary memory is available.
Actually, Linux gets to use a little swap when you load something that's
large (maybe large enough to use up all physical memory) and not quite
fully cached (as addressable memory shows). Here's my `top -b -n1 | head
-5' now:
top - 00:41:29 up 1:37, 1 user, load average: 0.16, 0.12, 0.15
Tasks: 83 total, 2 running, 81 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 6.3% us, 1.0% sy, 0.2% ni, 86.2% id, 2.5% wa, 3.7% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 256376k total, 241368k used, 15008k free, 7788k buffers
Swap: 289128k total, 8k used, 289120k free, 98952k cached
As you can see, I now have 8k of swap used, since I've loaded
Firefox. Before, the number was larger (like 16k) because Firefox had to
pull up GTK2; now, I have Emacs CVS built in GTK2, so the libs are
cached.
Another factor is hard-on disk-CPU processing, like AIDE[1] scanning for
spooks or wwwoffle[2] updating its caches and rebuilding the search db.
Footnotes:
[1] Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, a file-checking system
[2] This was the web-caching system I wrote in your earlier thread. It
can do keyword-based searching using external search engine
software such as htdig or namazu.
--
ZAK B. ELEP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- <http://zakame.spunge.org>
1024D/FA53851D 1486 7957 454D E529 E4F1 F75E 5787 B1FD FA53 851D
-- Running Debian GNU+Linux testing/unstable. GnuPG signed mail preferred.
pgpsXKg9GbW0E.pgp
Description: PGP signature
-- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [email protected] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
