Re: Sarge: plenty of free RAM, but uses swap

From: Micha Feigin (michf_at_post.tau.ac.il)
Date: 01/30/05

  • Next message: Carl Fink: "Re: es1371 unloads itself?" 
    Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:11:42 +0200 (IST)
To: debian-user@lists.debian.org

    On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Hannes Mayer wrote:

    > On Sun, 30 Jan 2005 15:55:57 +0200 (IST), Micha Feigin
    > <michf@post.tau.ac.il> wrote:
    > > On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Hannes Mayer wrote:
    > >
    > > > Hi all!
    > > >
    > > > I just noticed that sarge is using swap, but there is still plenty of
    > > > memory free:
    > > > # free
    > > > total used free shared buffers cached
    > > > Mem: 1036532 441552 594980 0 23732 265492
    > > > -/+ buffers/cache: 152328 884204
    > > > Swap: 351752 0 351752
    > > >
    > > > # uname -a
    > > > Linux debian 2.6.8-1-686 #1 Thu Nov 25 04:34:30 UTC 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
    > > >
    > > > My previous distro (Fedora2) didn't use swap at all. It just occupied
    > > > almost all RAM, of course with lots of "cached" showing up at # free.
    > > > How can one force it to use RAM first and then swap ?
    > > > (I've google, but didn't find a solution)
    > > >
    > >
    > > If you read the output, in the swap entry you have
    > >
    > > total: 351752
    > > used: 0
    > > free: 351752
    > >
    > > So you are using 0 swap at the moment. Free just tells you that you have
    > > 351752 available (notice the column titles)
    >
    > WOW! Silly me!
    > Thanks Björn and Micha!
    >
    > I guess I was a bit confused, because I could hear the harddrive every
    > few seconds doing something tiny. Is there any way to check which
    > program is currently doing disk I/O ?
    >

    There may be a more strait forward way, but one method is to use laptop
    mode.

    echo -n 1 > /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
    echo -n 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump

    I think that you get the output on the console, not sure if you can see it
    in the terminal, maybe it will show at the end of dmesg output or
    /var/log/messages. I don't recall anymore, sorry.

    > Thanks a lot,
    > Hannes.
    >
    >
    > +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    > This Mail Was Scanned By Mail-seCure System
    > at the Tel-Aviv University CC.
    > 

    -- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
  • Next message: Carl Fink: "Re: es1371 unloads itself?"