Illogical usage of swap

[Lowell Gilbert]

"Colin J. Raven" <colin at kenmore.kozy-kabin.nl> writes:

> On Mar 16 at 07:29, Lowell Gilbert launched this into the bitstream:

> > http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#TOP-FREEMEM
> 
> Hmm, yeah I should have included what I've actually read in the
> handbook and elsewhere. In fact I did read that exerpt you quoted the
> URL for  above sometime previously, when it was quoted in another
> thread on the list.
> 
> 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.

The same logic applies to some extent, though.

> No way in creation this box should be swapping.

I have noticed that FreeBSD 5.x is swapping out small amounts of
memory in situations (as near I can tell; it is quite hard to be sure
that the situation is really identical) where 4.x was not.  I haven't
really tried to track down exactly what's going on, but it's always
been less than the text segment of any task in the system, so I was
pretty sure I wasn't seeing a problem.