Swap Memory in use or not?

Qebex · 09-20-2002, 01:10 PM

I took a look at my Swap Memory via KDE System Guard. it show that my swap memory is largely constant and flat that around 3 - 4 MB range. This does not look quite normal to me. is the swap memory started or even mounted? how can I check and make sure?

Qebex · 09-20-2002, 01:18 PM

my total physical memory is 255.82MB
Free Physical memory is 15MB
Shared memory is 0MB
Buffered memory is 3.95MB
Cached memory is 76.55MB
total swap memory is 522MB
Free swap memory is 489.74MB

what does cached ram, shared memory and buffered memory is used for? how come swap memory is not much in used. plus there's little free physical memory, which this cause linux to crash? in windows, swap memory/pagefile is often on the high high dispite same amount of memory.

finegan · 09-20-2002, 07:13 PM

Under Linux the kernel will cache basically anything recently used into RAM, but not extend that on to HD swap until it has to. I don't know how the priority schema works entirely, but with the perverse amount of RAM people have these days, its standard for a machine to eat up all the RAM, swap down nothing to disk and that's normal operation. For instance, here's a low-traffic server.

Cheers,

Finegan

Qebex · 09-21-2002, 12:18 AM

cool. windows maintain a high amount of pagefile size though.

Aussie · 09-21-2002, 07:16 AM

Linux uses all the available ram, mostly to cache stuff. The theory is that unused ram is wasted ram.

unSpawn · 09-21-2002, 07:59 AM

Also don't forget part of the VM behaviour is tweakable tru the /proc/sys/vm and sysctl interface.