Re: why does it use swap?

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Martin Würtele wrote:
> 
> why does my server user swap if top givex me:
> 
>  10:36am  up 19:06,  1 user,  load average: 0.02, 0.04, 0.00
>  123 processes: 121 sleeping, 1 running, 1 zombie, 0 stopped
>  CPU states:  0.5% user,  0.9% system,  0.0% nice, 98.4% idle
>  Mem:  1029200K av, 534364K used, 494836K free,      0K shrd,   2772K buff
>  Swap: 257032K av, 255216K used,   1816K free                294632K cached
> 
> telling that 494 mb ram are free?

  my guess would be that stuff that is not used for certain amount of
time is swapped out anyway, even if there is some free memory left. unix
system generaly tend to use all available memory, the memory that is not
used by programs is used by buffers etc. (it's freed when more memory is
needed)... by swapping out unused pages it has more memory left for when
the big hit comes... that's roughly how it works but I am not 100% sure
that it's what caused swap being used in your case.

	erik