Illogical usage of swap

[Colin J. Raven]

On Mar 16 at 15:07, Giorgos Keramidas said:

> On 2005-03-16 14:02, "Colin J. Raven" <colin at kenmore.kozy-kabin.nl> wrote:
>> On Mar 16 at 14:54, Giorgos Keramidas asked:
>>>> Free memory (or the lack thereof) isn't the issue though.
>>>>
>>>> The issue is this:
>>>> Swap: 8192M Total, 116K Used, 8192M Free
>>>> and that's the piece of the puzzle that has us all utterly baffled.
>>>>
>>>> No way in creation this box should be swapping.
>>>
>>> Do you, by any chance, have vm.swap_idle_enabled set to 1?
>>
>> No, it isn't:
>> gonzo# sysctl -a |grep vm.swap_idle_enabled
>> vm.swap_idle_enabled: 0
>
> Strange.  AFAIK, processes are not swapped out to disk unless there is a
> severe memory shortage.  The usual case is to have them "paged" out,
> which is a bit different.

That was my understanding also, and that's what's baffling us

Regards,
-Colin
--
Colin J. Raven
Wed Mar 16 14:17:00 CET 2005