intr using Swap

[dweimer]

On 2016-02-17 12:56 pm, Efraín Déctor wrote:

> El 17/02/2016 a las 12:34 p. m., dweimer escribió:
> 
>> I believe you are incorrectly reading it, the first character of the state line being a W Marks an idle interrupt thread, W only means swapped out if its an additional character in the section. 
>> 
>> man ps 
>> [...snip...] 
>> state     The state is given by a sequence of characters, for example, 
>> ``RWNA''.  The first character indicates the run state of the 
>> process: 
>> [...snip...] 
>> W       Marks an idle interrupt thread. 
>> [...snip...] 
>> Additional characters after these, if any, indicate additional 
>> state information: 
>> [...snip...] 
>> W       The process is swapped out. 
>> [...snip...] 
>> 
>> Even when there is available memory if an item has already been swapped it wont return to physical memory until the process needs access that memory. Its not uncommon to see systems that had a brief memory constraint leave some swap long after the memory has been cleared up.
> 
> Hello.
> 
> Thank you for your response. 
> 
> Using only _ps ax_ doesn't show any process being in swap. How can I determine what processes are being swapped out?

They may not show as swapped unless the entire process is actually
swapped, which would be unlikely to occur. Personally I wouldn't worry
about it, the only thing I can think of is to restart processes one at a
time to see which one clears up the swap usage. Granted you may see a
little clear after each process. 

The more important task would be to determine what caused the memory to
run out in the first place, and decide if its going to be a frequent
enough occurrence to justify adding physical memory to the system. 

There is likely some way to find out what is using it, but that is
beyond my knowledge.

-- 
Thanks,
   Dean E. Weimer
   http://www.dweimer.net/