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... -- Please do not CC me! Mutt (www.mutt.org) can handle this automatically. .''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debian.org> : :' : proud Debian developer, admin, and user `. `'` `- Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing a system NOTE: The pgp.net keyservers and their mirrors are broken! Get my key here: http://people.debian.org/~madduck/gpg/330c4a75.asc
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