LinuxQuestions.org - activating swap space

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activating swap space

I am running SuSe 10, and I had it installed for a while. When I installed it i created a swap partion at /dev/hda3 with 2.28GB. I just now found out that the kernel is not using the swap space as virtual memory. I executed 'free' and it printed:

Code:

treborsnevets:/home/rstevens # free

            total      used      free    shared    buffers    cached

Mem:        386164    233372    152792          0      12364      75640

-/+ buffers/cache:    145368    240796

Swap:      2385636          0    2385636

I tried googling for an answer to use the space and i read The Linux System Administrator's Guide, and i was baffled. How do you create and use swap space?

that's a vast amount of swap... why so huge?? ever thought that your system simply didn't need the space? you've not even used all the RAM up yet according to that free output. 152mb of ram still totally unused.

It's not using the swap because you still have ~230MB of physical RAM free. This is perfectly normal, and trust me, swap is one of those things that's good to have, and even better if you never have to use it.

Edit: oooh, snaked.