swap partition, but no swapping

Kropotkin · 03-05-2006, 06:36 AM

On my Pentium IV system with 1 GB of RAM, running FC4, I am getting long periods of disk thrashing after several week's of uptime, notably when running RAM-greedy apps like Gimp, Firefox, and Thunderbird. It has a 1 GB swap partition, which fdisk recognizes as such:

Code:

/dev/sdc2              14         140     1020127+  82  Linux swap / Solaris

But when I run 'free'

Code:

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1010        997         13          0          7        136
-/+ buffers/cache:        853        156
Swap:            0          0          0

it appears that swap space is not being used.

On my Ununtu system, which has 512 MB RAM and a 1.5 GM swap partition, I see this, for example:

Code:

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           496        490          6          0         27         68
-/+ buffers/cache:        393        103
Swap:         1451        242       1208

Is it possible that swap on my FC4 box has been inadvertently disabled? If so, I do I determine this and how do I re-enable it?

michaelk · 03-05-2006, 07:01 AM

Correct, swap is not being enabled on the FC4 box.
Is there an entry in the /ec/fstab file for swap?
To enable swap from the command line.
swapon /dev/sdc2

Kropotkin · 03-05-2006, 12:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelk

Correct, swap is not being enabled on the FC4 box.
Is there an entry in the /ec/fstab file for swap?
To enable swap from the command line.
swapon /dev/sdc2

Thanks, that fixed it. It appeared there was an obsolete entry in /etc/fstab, ie, the swap line was pointing to a partition that no longer existed. Once I fixed that, I was enable to activate swap. Must have happened when I added a new HD awhile back.