Why is Swap Space Being Used?

Nick W · l33t Joined: 07 Dec 2003 Posts: 684

hi everyone,

I have 1gb of RAM and am certainly (to the best of my knowlege) not doing anything odd on my Gentoo box, but i see via the KDE sys monitor that 49% of my Swap space is being used?

cat /proc/meminfo
SwapTotal: 506036 kB
SwapFree: 257096 kB

Now, i know this can't be right, right?

Can anyone help find where the problem is, it used to do this on my old x86 gentoo box (nforce2) and is now repeating on my amd64 box (nforce3)

thanks for any advice....

firephoto · Posted: Wed May 04, 2005 5:22 pm Post subject:

Amarok running perhaps? It can be a memory hog, possibly due to editing song tags. It used up over a gig of system memory on me once.

_________________
#gentoo-kde on freenode

bork_bigjoe · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Caltech

Run 'top' and then press 'M' (capital M) and it will show you the process list sorted by memory usage. You should be able to identify whether there is some process using a huge amount of memory.

I found that I had some orphaned kpdf processes that were eating huge amounts of memory and causing my system (also 1GB ram) to thrash for no particularly good reason recently.

Nick W · l33t Joined: 07 Dec 2003 Posts: 684

Well i had 4/5 instances (in 'top') of liferea-bin, all at 15% - when i quit liferea it dropped from 51% free swap to 75% free swap - i also had 4/5 of firefox-bin at 9% each - though only one FF and one liferea open on a desktop?

Anyway, i could not get it below 75% free by closing things, and besides that, it says i have 83% RAM free - so why would it use swap anyway....

This just doesn't seem right to me...

andrew_j_w · Guru Joined: 28 Jun 2003 Posts: 534 Location: York, UK

Well why not? It's probably just memory that hasn't been accessed for ages and has been swapped out to make room for more cache and disk buffers. Unless your system is noticeably swapping then I wouldn't worry about it...

Andrew

bork_bigjoe · n00b Joined: 28 Mar 2005 Posts: 57 Location: Caltech

Once you've started using swap, it's pretty rare for it ever to clear back out completely. Most programs have pages of memory that aren't used often, so they'll just be left in swap until they're needed which may not be for a long time. As long as you have free RAM, you won't encounter thrashing.

Nick W · l33t Joined: 07 Dec 2003 Posts: 684

OK, thanks for all the help - I thought there was a problem but from what I hear, it's not.

thanks again..