Inspired by the recent diskussions of swap, I did some own experiments. For thos who are interested, there is a graph of free mem and used swap against time at http://k2.lund.se/~jb/swap.gif (4k).
It seems to be that the more memory is used up, the more memory the kernel decides needs to be free. My p166 has 64 mb ram and 128 mb swap. When I begin I have 15 mb ram free and 6 mb swapped. I start netscape. First, memory goes down to 0 then up to 25 mb free as more is swapped out, stabilizes at 15 mb swapped. I play around a little, load a few pages, memory slowly decreases of course. The I load a fairly large jpeg (1590x1213). Memory at first goes down, then it starts swapping. While I essentially do nothing except sitting there lokking at the monitor, the system swaps and swaps until I have ~48 mb free ram and as much on the swap.
I try starting an xterm - it takes ~10 seconds. Why? There are 48 mb free ram...! Why do I want 48 mb free ram at the price of an extremely sluggish system? Changing to another workspace takes several seconds as every little window (xterm etc.) need to be swapped back in.
Is this behavior really the Right Thing?
-- Jakob Borg <jb@k2.lund.se> Finger for PGP key or info- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
