On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 18:07 +0100, Andy Green wrote: > Somebody in the thread at some point said: > > > On Tue, 2007-07-24 at 09:24 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote: > >> Mem: 482776k total, 475472k used, 7304k free, 29076k buffers > >> Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 163588k cached > > > > [...] > > > >> This means it was using the swap partition on the hard drive. > > > > What swap partition? Your system doesn't have any swap(?!?). > > > > Your memory usage is almost completely saturated and you have *NO* swap > > to fall back on. If it hasn't already then you're kernel freemem killer > > is very soon going to start cutting the legs from beneath random > > programs all over your process list. > > He has plenty of memory though, 163MB of it is "free" and in use as disk > cache for want of anything better to do with it. If the top is > representative, it is nothing to do with lack of memory, although you're > right he has no swap enabled. True, but in my (admittedly limited) experience, things get pretty dicey by the time the cache gets down to less than 1/3 total RAM, and 500Mb is, nowadays, adequate but not a lot to start with.
