Yes, your swap space usage is increasing. If it is growing slowly, then your guess as to why vmstat isn't showing anything is probably correct.
You still have about 34MB of usable "real" storage left, so you're not in any immediate danger of your system dying, but I would get some more swap space defined very soon. 70MB for a 256MB system is rather low. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Romanowski, John (OFT) Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2007 2:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: what's the free command telling me about linux swap space? I run free -m on SLES9 SP3 once a week and don't know whether it's telling me linux is using more and more swap space or not. Any explanations would be appreciated; the man page doesn't explain the columns. Here's sample outpout from free -m at done at one week intervals. The "total" "used" and "free" columns for the "Swap:" line are what I'm asking about. The "used" numbers are increasing, the "free" numbers decreasing, they add up to the "total"; I also run command "vmstat -S M" and its swap "si' and "so" columns always say 0, making me think the swapping/sec is so low as to be reported as 0. free -m (on 12/27/06) total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 247 243 3 0 9 17 -/+ buffers/cache: 216 30 Swap: 70 60 9 ------------------------------------------- free -m (on 1/3/07) total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 247 242 5 0 6 22 -/+ buffers/cache: 212 34 Swap: 70 63 6 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
