Hi, I am having an odd problem here. After I upgraded to Kubunut 6.01 ( or maybe 6.0 ) my swap drive was not mounted automatically and I have to go into System Settings upon bootup to enable my swap drive. Now, all of a sudden it doesn't work. I am able to mount it but it is not being used.
When I type in free into the konsole I get:

total used free
Mem 499092 490564 8528
Swap 1461872 0 1461872

I cannot use my computer as it is too slow at the moment and I don't want to reinstall kubuntu. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

I should also note that under System Settings the swap drive line says:

3 Partition 1.4 Gb <mount point> swap /dev/hda5 Enabled

Swap would only be used when the kernel runs out of physical RAM or other memory intensive applications require memory and no more physical RAM is available. In which case, kernel swaps out certain processes that are lesser priority or are not running.

By design, kernel uses as much memory as possible to keep anything from going to swap as swap memory is way slower than the physical RAM.

Check out memory management on gentoo wiki.

Also check out wikipedia article on virtual memory.

Kerry,

Just to add to what Tux said... if you're coming from Windows, they have a very poor memory management system. It appears as though Windows will use their SWAP all the time. Linux will only do it if absolutely necessary. So, what you're reading is not a mistake

Regards,

Brandon

Thanks for the help! I should have added that I have been using Kubuntu since April of 2006, and I have checked the System Load profiles from time to time and whenever I have enabled the swap drive recently, it would show that swap memory is being used...My computer used to go fast with linux but now it is slow as muddd

Kerry,

You might want to think about a different distribution. Try Damn Small Linux. It might suit you and your computer much better. Just a suggestion.

Regards,

Brandon

To diagnose this problem you should open a terminal window and try turning swap on manually:
Replace hdaX with your real swap partition. Now you should see if any error messages are generated.

Even better - what does "swapon -s" show ???.