also sprach David Z Maze <dmaze@debian.org> [2002.12.22.1952 +0100]:
> > total used free shared buffers cached
> > Mem: 516580 475844 40736 0 170540 224736
> > -/+ buffers/cache: 80568 436012
> > Swap: 996020 0 996020
> >
> > now say i'll start openoffice and mozilla and a couple of others, just to
> > consume RAM. the system will not use the swap space. any idea why not?
>
> It doesn't need to. It looks like you have 512 MB of physical RAM;
> that's a lot, even if you are trying to run Mozilla. :-) What you've
> posted suggests that (a) the kernel knows your swap space exists but
> is intentionally ignoring it, and (b) you have about 436 MB of ~unused
> RAM. Until that looks like it's in danger of going, you're not going
> to go into swap at all.
Fact is: at this stage, starting mozilla and openoffice makes the
mouse go really unreactive and the computer slow. it sometimes even
just hard-locks.
i know little about the VM of linux (why should i, it's broken
anyway), but it does strike me as weird to see a '0' under used on
a system that's been up for days.
my laptop has 1Gb of RAM and another Gb of swap, and after 1.5 hours
of uptime, loading the windowmanager (windowmaker) and mutt a couple
of times, along with one instance of galeon shows this:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1033792 770404 263388 0 48620 556772
-/+ buffers/cache: 165012 868780
Swap: 996020 31556 964464
afaik, the linux kernel will try to consume all the available memory
and use it internally. i've just never seen a 0 in the swap/used cell,
and the system hardlocks at times. i'll go and test the RAM too, but
right now, my guess is: swap space...
> (I think the conventional wisdom of "swap should be twice physical
> RAM" is clearly wrong these days;
why "clearly" wrong? it doesn't hurt, does it? if you give linux too
much swap, it can't deal, but 1Gb is within the bounds of the
possible...
--
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.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org>
: :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user
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