Re: My System doesn't use swap!

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Kyle Moffett wrote:
> On Jan 31, 2005, at 07:44, Matthias-Christian Ott wrote:
> 
>> Ok maybe I wasn't able to read the /free/ output correctly, but why is no
>> swap used (more than 60% ram are used)?
> 
> 
> Swap is orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Why put things there if you
> still have RAM left?  The kernel only puts things in swap when it has no
> more RAM _and_ has already deleted big chunks of its disk cache.

Unless he just booted, I would expect at least a little use of the swap, 
something like this, on a machine with 1GB RAM and not much happening. 
It's burning in with setiathome, and I played a few mp3s, and it seemed 
to feel the need for swap. I see similar on a box with 4GB, it never 
comes close to low memory, but still uses a few MB swap.

pixels:davidsen> free
              total       used       free     shared    buffers    cached
Mem:       1035228     996712      38516          0     175100    67932
-/+ buffers/cache:     553680     481548
Swap:      2048248      11292    2036956
pixels:davidsen> uname -rn
pixels.tmr.com 2.6.10-ac2


Not that this is a bad thing, but I'm surprised at no swap used at all.

-- 
    -bill davidsen (davidsen@tmr.com)
"The secret to procrastination is to put things off until the
  last possible moment - but no longer"  -me