Thanks for the tips guys. I will be more trusting of my kernel from now on. I imagine Linus knows better than I about what's a good use of my swap. ;)
--Dave <quote who="Michael Torrie"> > 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 ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://phantom.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
