Re: Increasing Swap

[Erik Steffl <steffl@bigfoot.com>]

Aniartia wrote:
> 
> On Monday 19 November 2001 04:51, Erik Steffl wrote:
> > Mark Lanett wrote:
> > > Unless I'm mistaken, swap in the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels only gets used when
> > > you run out of RAM. So if you are upping your RAM and not upping the
> > > number of tasks you run, there would be no need to increase swap. Less
> > > reason if anything, but disk space is too cheap to make it worth
> > > repartitioning downwards.
> > >
> > > You really need to know how much of ram and/or swap you generally use.
> > > With Windows NT/2K, the Task Manager's Performance tab tells you this
> > > (Commit Charge, Total used currently, Peak used overall, and Limit of ram
> > > and swap together). How does one determine this with Linux?
> >
> >   it's in /proc, there are several programs you can use:
> >
> >   free, top, xosview, gkrellm... etc. there are some system monitors for
> > gnome and kde...
> >
> >   basically you want swap as a sort of safety buffer - if there's
> > something unexpected (that eats up a lot of memory) you don't want
> > kernel to start to kill programs (which it has to).
> >
> >       erik
> 
> Intersting you say that cause on my system 2.4.6 swap is rather premptive,
> right now:
> Memory 637M/55M:29M:187M (total/used:buffered:cached)
> Swap: 1.2G/63M (total/used)
> I do belive that means I've got ~370Mb RAW free, anyone wish to comment?

  not sure what are all the reason for stuff to get swapped out (perhpas
the long sleeping process?) but if it was swapped out for some reason it
doesn't get back into RAM unitil it's needed. So the reason why your
system is using 63MB of swap space might be some past need, even though
right now you have plenty of memory free (cached is basically free, as
far as apps are concerned, it's used for disc cache but it would be
freed if apps need more memory).

	erik