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Re: Sarge: plenty of free RAM, but uses swap



On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Hannes Mayer wrote:

> On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:55:57 +0200 (IST), Micha Feigin
> <michf@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
> > On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Hannes Mayer wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi all!
> > >
> > > I just noticed that sarge  is using swap, but there is still plenty of
> > > memory free:
> > > # free
> > >              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> > > Mem:       1036532     441552     594980          0      23732     265492
> > > -/+ buffers/cache:     152328     884204
> > > Swap:       351752          0     351752
> > >
> > > # uname -a
> > > Linux debian 2.6.8-1-686 #1 Thu Nov 25 04:34:30 UTC 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
> > >
> > > My previous distro (Fedora2) didn't use swap at all. It just occupied
> > > almost all RAM, of course with lots of "cached" showing up at # free.
> > > How can one force it to use RAM first and then swap ?
> > > (I've google, but didn't find a solution)
> > >
> > 
> > If you read the output, in the swap entry you have
> > 
> > total: 351752
> > used: 0
> > free: 351752
> > 
> > So you are using 0 swap at the moment. Free just tells you that you have
> > 351752 available (notice the column titles)
> 
> WOW! Silly me!
> Thanks Björn and Micha!
> 
> I guess I was a bit confused, because I could hear the harddrive every
> few seconds doing something tiny. Is there any way to check which
> program is currently doing disk I/O ?
> 

There may be a more strait forward way, but one method is to use laptop 
mode.

echo -n 1 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
echo -n 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump

I think that you get the output on the console, not sure if you can see it 
in the terminal, maybe it will show at the end of dmesg output or 
/var/log/messages. I don't recall anymore, sorry.

> Thanks a lot,
> Hannes.
> 
> 
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