Will someone tell me a bit more about swap space? I'm worried that my Redhat runs slowly (on my fast-ish computer) because of my lack of slack space. Any ideas? I sort of want to try and play the super-duper starfighter game, not to mention Tux Racer!

Swap space is an emergency solution when you overload ram. Swapping turns a catastrophic failure (ram is full) into a major nuisance (system runs very slow).

When you start more programs than will fit into ram then Linux starts swapping data out to the swap partition. When that info is needed again Linux swaps it back into ram. Swapping is extremely slow. When you start swapping the solution is not to add more swap space on your disk. The solution is to either buy more ram or to run fewer programs at the same time.

Run top in a terminal window. It will show how much ram is being used and also how much of your swap is being used.

How much memory do you have ? The swap space should be at least equal to that (some suggested twice of your memory). Pu the swap space on its own partition

Hi,

I have tried with the free command and below is my result :

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 514464 464072 50392 0 49440 140540
-/+ buffers/cache: 274092 240372
Swap: 2048216 0 2048216



Strange thing is that the swap is not being used.Any idea why this is happening?WE have also just added 256MB ram to the server and its been used up to 464072 as you can see.


THanks


Andy

When a cache buffer or a program is no longer unused Linux does not free up the memory. Linux keeps the buffer or program in case it is ever needed again.

When a new memory request comes along Linux first tries to satisfy the request from memory that has never been used, then from memory that has been used but is now unused, and as a last resort it moves some active memory out to the swap partition to free up some memory for the new request.

The free command does not distinguish beteen memory that is actively being used and old memory that is being saved in case it is ever needed again. So if you issue a free command at boot it will show some free memory. After a while the free command will show all memory being used.

The way to tell if you are short of memory is to watch to see if Linux ever actually does any swapping.