Question about memory and swap

[MepisReign]

Hiya Guys:
I have a question, my system have 3 gigs of memory, I was thinking since my system have such memory quantity, why will use swap space?
Please check this out,

bob@bob-64bits:~$ free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3017 563 2454 0 15 209
-/+ buffers/cache: 338 2679
Swap: 6236 38 6197
bob@bob-64bits:~$

As u can see there is a lot of physical memory available, why then the OS will get swap space and how can I clear it?

Regards,

MepisReign

[Martijn van Es]

Re: Question about memory and swap

Hey MepisReign,

You should be able to change the size of your swap with a partition manager. There are a few available and i hear the Gnome manager is currently the most stabile.

When i read your post i think Why do you want to shrink the swap space? Are you in desperate need of 6GB

Also, before you shrink stuff you might want to check out what happens during a hibernate. You might need all that swap space to dump your RAM.

[jankushka]

Re: Question about memory and swap

some reading before you decide on how to reconfigure:

what is virtual memory?
http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_admin/x1752.html

is swap space obsolete?
http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/softwar...rnel/swap.html


hth

[javierrivera]

Re: Question about memory and swap

As u can see there is a lot of physical memory available, why then the OS will get swap space and how can I clear it?

Linux by default will swap to disk apps just to have more buffers and cache as it believes that it will give you a better performance. And Linux is usually right , but while you do usually get better performance, you loose responsiveness (ie. perceived performance), changing to a swaped app takes a lot more, as it has to be read from disk.

There have been endless discussions about this, and there is a kernel setting called "swappiness" that regulates it. There also lots of discussions about it on the net. Just google for it and have fun.

Javier.

[MepisReign]

Re: Question about memory and swap

Thx for the replies, I'm definitely much clearer now.

Regards,

MepisReign