On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 09:45:37 -0500, Tommy Reynolds <tommy.reynolds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. but, .. but, ... I was told that swapping is bad, bad evil even always. If I'd ask you'd probably tell me Santa doesn't exist either? :P Thanks for the info! I'd still like to know what's using that much memory and why the usage is only increasing, why almos nothing is running - currently just a webserver serving an "unavailable" html page, since we've had some problems in the past week with incredibly high loads. Woke up wednesdaymorning at 6am after the server dinied all service the night before and still saw a load of 70 on the 15min avg. Anyway, drifting off. Besides the apache server there's postgres, doing nothing. And MySQL, doing nothing. And that's basically everything.
