Uttered Wouter van Vliet <wouter.van.vliet@xxxxxxxxx>, spake thus: >Crappy intro, huh? Anyway, I've got a question - bit of an oddity I >noticed in the output to the "free" command. I'll post that output >before I continue: > > total used free shared buffers cached >Mem: 515536 196040 319496 0 22448 120144 >-/+ buffers/cache: 53448 462088 >Swap: 1052248 151476 900772 > >Hope the mail brings it over nice and columny. Anyway, what it shows >is 311 megabytes of free memory and 147MB used swap space. Isn't that >a bit odd, and shouldn't the server only be swapping when all (or at >least most) of the RAM is in use? Nope, not odd at all. The kernel does "anticipatory swapping" by moving VM pages out that haven't been used in a while: this is called "buffer aging". This is a "good thing" because it helps the kernel have more free memory ready for a burst of activity in the future. No worries, mate.
Attachment:
pgpuEeSNCwLFJ.pgp
Description: PGP signature
