why the swapping

[Tim Middleton]

Running 6.0-release, with 2 gig ram. Typical memory stats like this (from 
top):

626M Active, 
1045M Inact, 
204M Wired, 
75M Cache, 
112M Buf, 
22M Free

Under moderately high load i'm seeing a lot of swapping periodically through 
the day (and then load avg going way, way up, of course). I'm wondering why 
is there, with so much inactive memory, so much disk swapping?

The machine runs some fairly intense stuff, such as squid, postgresql, and 
zope; but it seems to me there should be enough RAM to cover all of this 
without swapping. What am I missing? Am i misinterpretting the stats, and 
just not understanding how the vm works?

-- 
Tim Middleton | Vex.Net    | There is a wisdom that is woe; but there 
x at veX.net     | VexTech.ca | is a woe that is madness. --Melville (MD)