On 07/02/13 12:47, Gareth France wrote:
I've just had a peek and apparently it's using swap memory right now!
Memory 1.5Gb of 3.5Gb used
Swap 658.9Mb of 3.7Gb used
Using swap is not a problem. Swapping is the problem.
Using swap just means there's a chunk of space on disk which is set
aside to swap stuff into, or stuff has been swapped into it.
Swapping is the act of throwing stuff out to disk or pulling stuff in.
Intensive swapping will slow the machine down and cause things to become
very sluggish.
I would open a terminal (as others have suggested) and have it running
"vmstat 5" which will print a line every 5 seconds like this:-
rocs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy
id wa
1 0 894156 2244868 50860 1636816 6 12 945 66 60 164 23
5 72 0
0 0 894152 2242432 50876 1637120 6 0 6 39 1047 3910 11
2 87 0
2 0 894148 2247616 50884 1637184 0 0 6 35 980 3671 9
2 88 0
0 0 894148 2247588 50900 1637184 0 0 0 65 939 3379 8
2 90 0
0 0 894148 2247260 50908 1636908 0 0 0 12 834 3111 7
2 91 0
0 0 894148 2185816 50928 1698776 0 0 0 147 1093 4012 11
2 88 0
Ignore the first line, but when things go bad you'll see the numbers
change. The "si" and "so" columns indicate swapping, if they're
repeatedly non-zero then you're doing some swapping. "bi" and "bo" can
mean just general disk IO (like the normal stuff applications do). "us"
is cpu time spent running applications and "sy" is system time. You may
also see high "cs" (context switches) as the processor is under load,
flipping between one task and another, and rarely getting any real work
done.
vmstat and top are very good for diagnosing this stuff, don't bother
with gui tools, they just make it worse :)
Cheers,
--
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager
Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.p...@canonical.com
http://ubuntu.com/
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