why the swapping

[Ronald Klop]

On Thu, 18 May 2006 13:33:07 +0200, Tim Middleton <x at vex.net> wrote:

>
> 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?

What is the memory use of your applications? Reported by top (SIZE and  
RES) or by ps.
How much (different) data from/to disk is being processed by your  
applications in what time interval?

Ronald.

-- 
  Ronald Klop
  Amsterdam, The Netherlands