On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 10:05:10AM -0800, Wim Kerkhoff wrote:
> How much though? On the many various Linux systems I have had access to,
> I haven't seen a situation where there is 100mb of free memory, but 50mb
> sitting in swap. Perhaps a couple of megs, but nothing of consequence.
I think the actual numbers depend on the kernel's scheduler,
which is exchangeable as you might know. For most use cases (and
therefore most servers) the standard scheduler is perfectly
alright but there might be machines which perform better with
another scheduler. I never played around with this personally, I
just read it somewhere, but I couldn't rediscover the article in
a quick search (the search engine of kernelnotes.org is down)
> I just checked a server with 512mb... nothing was free and 60mb of stuff
> was sitting in swap. I don't think this is due to having lots of big
> processes around, but at one point (yesterday) some memory intensive
> apps were run, which probably pushed things to swap which weren't
> unswapped.
The weren't unswapped means they weren't needed, so why should
the kernel unswap them? There is a fairly high probability that
you start a memory intensive process again before one of the
outswapped processes is needed again...
Andre
PS: sorry for the late answer, I was on a business trip without
a laptop and therefore cut from email... got to catch up with the
latest few hundred mails now... ;-)
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