Re: ps output

[Felix Natter <fnatter@gmx.net>]

> Hello everyone. In the output of the ps command I see that some of the 
> processes have state codes of SW.
> The ps man page states that the 'W' means that the process "has no 
> resident pages." What does
> this mean?

A "page" in this context is a small part of memory. (Think of "page fault"
which means
that an application accesses parts of memory that belong to other apps)

This means that the code and data of the application is swapped to disk.
When the program is not currently used, its code and data are "swapped"
(written on disk in the swap-parition), so that the memory can be used by
another
application.
For example, I think I heard that the sun java vm + apps require ~100MB, but
most of it is
swapped, so it only about 10MB (depending on apps) are used.

-- 
Felix Natter