On Thu, 22 Feb 2007, Peter Hardy wrote:

> I'm a little puzzled by this:
> 
>               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:        5005084    4816352     188732          0     156644    3165540
> -/+ buffers/cache:     1494168    3510916
> Swap:       1052616    1052616          0
> 
> Is this sort of usage normal? Filling a gigabyte of swap space while
> just under 1.5GB of memory is going towards buffers seems odd to me. And
> vmstat reports no usage of this swap space over a 15 minute period.
> 
> What sort of utilities are around to analyse swap space? I'd like to get
> an idea of exactly what's using all of that memory.

If a background daemon loads a bunch of stuff into memory, but then never 
accesses those pages, it can get swapped out, in favor of buffering files 
that *are* being used.  This does improve overall performance and is 
normally useful, though counterintuitive at first.

--Jeremy

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