2.4.10 and swap usage

[Mike Pfleger <pfleger@pfleger-precision.com>]

Hello, all.

I was building a web-browsable directory of constructivist and post-
constructivist art, and when I was done mucking about, I noticed that
gkrellm was reporting that swap was about 40% used.  To my dismay,
closing the GIMP and Netscape did not free any swap.  Can I assume that
NS had consumed this swap building it's image cache prior to display?
I don't know what else to attribute this to.

The relevant snippet from the o/p of top:

52 processes: 51 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:   1.4% user,   0.4% system,   0.0% nice,  98.2% idle
Mem:    256372K total,    92544K used,   163828K free,     1228K buffers
Swap:   131032K total,    60292K used,    70740K free,    50068K cached

I thought the swap issues had finally been licked in this release of the
kernel.(?)  Back to 2.2.x for this production box, I suppose?  :(

Is there still a constraint for a minimum swap size relative to physical
memory with 2.4.x kernels?  Unfortunately, I won't be able to enlarge
the swap partition on this box until moving to a different HDD sometime.

TIA,
Mike Pfleger

There's seventy brilliant people on earth.
Where are they hiding?
"Yashar" -Cabaret Voltaire (off of "2x45")