On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 20:59, David Smith wrote: > Top says this about my memory usage: > > Mem: 257144K total, 225800K used, 31344K free, 21744K buffers > Swap: 1068312K total, 17936K used, 1050376K free, 163552K cached > > Which means that I have about 194Mb free (31Mb free + 163Mb cached) > memory. Three questions: > Soren is correct. Linux aggressively uses swap to increase performance.
> 1. Why is there some swap being used (17Mb)? The VM has determined that the working processes in memory only have a working set of x number of pages, so it swaps the rest out, and uses the ram for more important things like disk caching. I see that your question is why is there 31 Mb free and still using 17 mb of swap. Basically, Linux is being conservative. There's no reason for the 17 mb to be in memory, since they are outside the working set, so linux sets aside the space for future caching, or perhaps to maintain a certain number of free frames. > 2. How can I tell the kernel to free that up so that it's not using any swap? Turn off the swap altogether. But I don't recommend. I've heard several people say things like "I have plenty of ram -- I don't need any swap." This may be true but I think swap is always a good idea. 1:1 these days is usually sufficient if you have at least 512 mb of ram. If you're planning on any image manipulation, perhaps 1 GB of swap would be good. > 3. Does it really matter? Not at all. Michael > > --Dave > > > > > ____________________ > BYU Unix Users Group > http://uug.byu.edu/ > ___________________________________________________________________ > List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list -- Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
