On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:24 +1100, Zhasper wrote: > On 22/02/07, Peter Hardy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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. > > You're running Linux, right?
Aye. It's a 2.4 kernel dating from somewhere before swappiness became tuneable. > This can be really great on a system with not much ram where large > apps that you haven't used in a while (eg, OOo) will get swapped out > when they're not being used, to make lots of space to cache all the > pr0^H^H^Himages of your grandmother's birthday party that you're > scanning through agressively.. In my rush to be as detailed as possible, I completely forgot to mention what the machine in question is actually doing. Well, it's a web server for a single (fairly high-traffic) domain. Apart from apache and the web application software, there's nothing running on it apart from the usual collection of processes that are essential to a well behave unix system. init, crond, syslogd. This is easily the biggest system I've found myself responsible for, and the way the memory's been allocated doesn't line up with anything else I've seen before. Just curious as to how and why it's being used like this. -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
