2.4.5: swap/VM strangeness

Frank van Maarseveen (fvm@tasking.nl)
Thu, 14 Jun 2001 18:31:35 +0200

A PIII with 96MB ram became extremely sluggish inside X11. I managed
to terminate the X server, bringing the system in a useful state
again. While the system was completely quiet (no X server) I noticed
that a lot of both memory and swap was being used for no appearent reason:

# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 93692 85164 8528 0 1404 75252
-/+ buffers/cache: 8508 85184
Swap: 133048 54944 78104

# swapoff -a
(took a minute)

# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 93692 41760 51932 0 1420 24828
-/+ buffers/cache: 15512 78180
Swap: 0 0 0

# swapon -a
# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 93692 41852 51840 0 1420 24848
-/+ buffers/cache: 15584 78108
Swap: 133048 0 133048

It looks as if the swap partition is being cached in main memory.

-- 
Frank
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