On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 05:46:20PM +0200, Robert Voigt wrote: > > > The thing is, just because some swap space is used, that doesn't mean > > that the pages aren't also in physical RAM. Linux is actually very good > > about keeping things efficient, and you certainly don't need to reboot > > to continue working. > > Things were getting really slow because the harddrive was obviously spending > all the time in swap. So it was faster to reboot. > Maybe in that particular case when it was worst the memory was all eaten by a > badly behaving app. I'll look at top next time to find out for sure. Are you sure that the drive was spending all its time in swap? What does vmstat tell you? Run 'vmstat 1' to print out updates every second, and look in the 'so' and 'si' columns. Those are swap out and swap in, respectively. If those are 0 or some small non 0 number then your system is not actively swapping and performance is fine. Also, as somebody else pointed out, using top and sorting the list by memory usage will help you determine if there's a given app that's taking up more RAM than it should. noah -- _______________________________________________________ | Web: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/ | PGP Public Key: http://web.morgul.net/~frodo/mail.html
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