Swap used while there is still free memory
 

I am curious as to why opensuse 12.1 is using small amounts of swap memory when there is still 700MB free out of a total of 2GB? All I am using this machine for is Firefox and I have stripped out stuff like the blue-tooth service, cups, and the mail services.

Swappiness:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness

From what I have gathered from the wiki is that this is a normal operation that linux carries on to ensure there is always memory. Thanks for the link, I am not too worried about since it hardly uses much, no more than 929k that I have noticed and the box is still running really well, load averages stay well below 1. I really only see swap being used after the box has been running firefox more than lets say 5 hours.