* On Thu, Feb 22, 2007 at 04:16:04PM +1100, 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.

<correct me if I'm wrong>
vmstat is your friend. A figure consistently > 0 for the so column
(swap out) often indicates problems. My understanding is the memory
manager in 2.6 will use a lot of swap on purpose.
</correct me if I'm wrong>

eg
$ vmstat 5 5
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa
 0  0  65580  12984 155944 302520    0    0     5     8    3     2 11  1 86  2
...

IBM do a good book on Linux Performance Tuning, which explains this
well.

-- 
Sonia Hamilton. GPG key A8B77238.
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