Re: swap never gets used

[Wilhelm Fitzpatrick <rafial@well.com>]

On Wednesday, Aug 13, 2003, at 11:54 US/Pacific, Mark Barr wrote:

> But when I attempt to use ant to compile our large project at work 
> (with a
> little over a thousand java files), I get an out of memory expception.
> Running 'top' shows me that my memory gets used up (as I would kind of
> expect), but 'used swap' never leaves 0k. The swap is simply not being 
> used.
>
> I tried 'swapon /dev/hda3', but got 'device or resource busy'
>
> Can anyone think of what I might be doing wrong?

Well, one thing to keep in mind is that ant is  a java process, and 
java processes have a maximum heap size that is set at the time the 
process is launched that is independent of the available memory in the 
machine.  By default, this is often set to 256meg.  So you may well be 
running out of java heap before actual physical memory is exhausted.

-wilhelm