swap space not being used

DarkBeethoven · 06-07-2002, 10:15 PM

I have two swap partitions.......they both mount fine with no problems.....

however, they aren't getting used.

when I issue the "free" command, they both report empty and not getting used. which is slowing me down a little.

one partition is 173 megs and the other is 128 megs (I have 320 megs of RAM)

I have already tried swapoff/mkswap/swapon numerous times with both partitions. They continue to mount and unmount fine, but they don't get used.

Why might this be happening?

trickykid · 06-07-2002, 10:27 PM

I would consider that a good thing when your swap isn't being used. That usually means your RAM is doing the job quite nicely the way it should be. I have 128 MB of RAM in this machine I am using and my 100 MB swap is rarely touched ever.

DarkBeethoven · 06-07-2002, 10:56 PM

really? it's good if it's not used?

cause everything is running so slowly

sakeeb · 06-07-2002, 11:17 PM

try to loging in X-server and logout one or two times. then your some of swap space will defenitely used. have fun with swap

neo77777 · 06-07-2002, 11:18 PM

Is there a lot of disc activity when linux is running? If the machine is pretty new with that amount of RAM it should be blasting fast? What processor do you have? If it is GUI that's running slow you might want to see if the X is giving you slow performance.

DarkBeethoven · 06-07-2002, 11:54 PM

it's a 633mhz computer with 320 megs of ram.......

yes, there is lots of drive activity......

even if I try to load a thousand programs on purpose, there's no swap space used.

is the swap too big? (170 for one and 128 for the other)

trickykid · 06-07-2002, 11:58 PM

the size of the swap shouldn't be causing it to slow down, your system can slow down if your swap starts getting all used up though.

what processes are running or how many ? it shouldn't be too slow with the specs you have.
try to eliminate some processes that you may not need that might be running, like httpd and the such.

lacrimae · 06-09-2002, 11:53 AM

Are you using KDE or Gnome? they are s-l-o-w. They feel slow, stuff takes forever to open.....

DarkBeethoven · 06-09-2002, 12:04 PM

yeah, that's exactly what I'm using..........

Is there something better?

Thymox · 06-09-2002, 12:09 PM

There's load of different window manager and desktop environments available. A very popular one seems to be BlackBox (or FluxBox, they're principally the same, but where BB is no longer in development, FB is). We shouldn't start a window-manager war here, though...there's already plenty of them around!

Check out Blackbox, Fluxbox, Waemaie (sp?), Sawfish, Enlightenment, Window Maker, XFCE, etc...