Hi

I have an IBM server and details as follows.


# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 7986948 7942344 44604 0 334704 2540748
-/+ buffers/cache: 5066892 2920056
Swap: 8385760 0 8385760

# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 7)

# uname -a
Linux AVAMEDL2 2.4.21-40.EL #1 SMP Thu Feb 2 22:14:00 EST 2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

# cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sda12 partition 2096440 0 -1
/dev/sda11 partition 2096440 0 -2
/dev/sda9 partition 2096440 0 -3
/dev/sda10 partition 2096440 0 -4

Runs Sybase IQ

I don’t see any swap is been used even though the server load go to 90% or so. To my knowledge any system should have some amount of swap (it cant be zero).

Can someone tell me what is going on?

Regards

*shrug* either you have all swap disabled (swapoff -a), or you have enough RAM that swap isn't needed.

On my workstation, I usually interpret any swap usage as evidence of a memory leak in the system someplace.

Seems fine to me. According to your output, you still have RAM left to be used.

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional.

In that case he wouldn't have the line in red
in the output of free ...
To the OP:

Just check how much RAM your processes gobble up according
to top/ps (just a rough guesstimate), but it looks perfectly
sane to me.


Cheers,
Tink

If you start using swap something is wrong. Linux does not work it's swap like windows. So rest assure that your machine is working optimal. I hope

What I dont understand is all the servers I have worked with (Not that many) even though there is ample RAM and server load is very minimal I could see some amount of swap is been used but this is the first time I am seeing (0k) as used space.

Thank you all for the replies

Best Regards

It is pretty good when it's not using swap or using very little swap.

What was the machines uptime at the time of that "free"?



Cheers,
Tink

Hi Tinkster

This server with (0k) used swap machine has been up for some time (could say 20 or more days). Considering the amount of time this server has been up I would expect some amount of swap space to be used (am I correct)
I have another server with 8G RAM and I did a reboot, even it just started I can see 300k is been used from swap.

Regards

Well ... as I said in 2nd last post: add up the values
that processes use up. It is quite possbile that the
machine doesn't need to page anything out at all.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks Tink