On Fri, 2002-04-26 at 12:54, Paul Sargent wrote: > Hi There, > As you can see, it's a 3G physical RAM box. Currently it's sitting there > with 885MB of Memory labeled as Cache, but if I run a process which requires > lots of memory, then the system seems to prefer swapping, rather than > freeing up the cache memory. For example... > Yes, some 40MB of cache gets freed, but it's mainly (300MB) of swap that > gets used. This tends to slow down processes before they need to. > > Anyone got any ideas? The Linux VM prefers to swap stuff out, instead of clearing the cache. Lot's of stuff can safely be swapped out, and using some (in this case 800M) of cache can speed things up more then swapping out useless data slow's it down. The cache will clear when more memory is needed, and peaces of memory that are accessed often would otherwise be swapped. So don't worry... it's normal behaviour... (the 40 MB that was swapped was probably unaccessed for some long time... If it would be accessed often the kernel would have reduced the cache.) -- Mark Janssen Unix / Linux, Open-Source and Internet Consultant @ SyConOS IT E-mail: mark(at)markjanssen.nl / maniac(at)maniac.nl GnuPG Key Id: 357D2178 hosts: Maniac.nl Unix-God.Net|Org MarkJanssen.com|net|org|nl SyConOS.com|nl
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