Re: zero swap free
On Thursday, Jan 22, 2004, at 22:34 America/Denver, David G. Schlecht
wrote:
I once read that the "free" value isn't that important, as long as the
system isn't thrashing -- which it's not. If I recollect, the
reasoning was that the swap is just rearranged next time someone has
to page to disk.
Correct. It just filled up completely at one point and things are now
"cached" in it.
Question 1: Since I'm not thrashing, right now, should I ignore the
zero free swap space or is it time to partition a larger swap? I often
see free memory (not swap) drop to 2 Mb when the machine is busy.
(Irrelevant?)
Hard to say. The Linux kernel will aggressively hold things in both
RAM and swap. Even large amounts of physical RAM on big servers will
eventually show very little RAM free because of the filesystem caching
the kernel does via RAM.
"Thrashing" as you say is probably the best indication of virtual
memory performance. When you "hit the wall" in Linux it's VERY
noticible... the machine thrashes, nothing seems to get done for very
long periods of time... etc.
Question 2: Will the free swap space ever go back up on its own or
will I have to kill and restart some processes?
You would have to reboot (don't bother) or disable and re-enable swap
(even sillier).
--
Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com
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