Re: swap space
On Thu, 2 Apr 1998 tko@westgac3.dragon.com wrote:
> I asked earlier on this list about why memory is sucked up into buffers. I
> appreciate the answers and thank everyone who responded. Now I have a new
> question: why won't the kernel release the swap space that it apparently
> needed sometime earlier? The kernel is 2.0.30
>
> Here's a snapshot of /proc/meminfo. Please note that it has 29 megs of
> physical memory available, but still insist on using swap space.
>
> total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached:
> Mem: 97660928 68157440 29503488 11612160 48906240 5804032
> Swap: 33026048 319488 32706560
Why should it release them? Why bother to copy 300K of very rarely
accessed memory from disk into RAM when it is quite happily leaving them
there, and thus having more free RAM?
It doesn't swap pages back from disk to RAM until something accesses them
(if I understand correctly).
Jules
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| Julian Bean | jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk | TW9 2TF *UK* |
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