activating swap space

robertunes · 01-22-2006, 03:29 PM

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?

acid_kewpie · 01-22-2006, 03:40 PM

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.

bulliver · 01-22-2006, 03:40 PM

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.