On Tue, 20 Aug 1996 02:54:49 +0200, Alessandro Suardi
<asuardi@uninetcom.it> said:
> I have a P100 40M RAM, RedHat 3.0.3 upgraded to kernel 2.0.13, I was
> running an hour of crashme-2.4 (couldn't get to sleep ;) and while
> sifting through my mail folders I noticed a slowdown with activity
> on the disk. To my surprise I was swapping.
Check the size of you mail folders. Some distributions email you with
their log files every so often, and that can produce a lot of junk in
your mail. Browsing through a number of large folders can certainly
use up a LOT of memory, depending on the browser.
> Crashme ended, I even quit Netscape (3.0b7) and exited X, but still
> I had little less than 2M swap used with over 30M free RAM.
That is expected. Once something has been swapped out to disk, it
will never be paged in again unless it is actually needed. A lot of
your system binaries do things at startup which they never refer to
again, so yes, it's not at all uncommon to have 2M of permanently
swapped data.
Cheers,
Stephen.
-- Stephen Tweedie <sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk> Department of Computer Science, Edinburgh University, Scotland.