> In some situations this is a good readout. If the O/S is doing its job,
> then that 24Mb in swap is disused code and data pages that are rarely
> accessed, if at all. As a bonus, that 24Mb can now be used for cache and
> buffers to reduce disk accesses and really make the system fly.
Good point. In fact, the paged-out pages were mostly unused pages, I
think, because xosview did not show a high rate of page-ins. However,
due to the sheer AMOUNT of pages that were paged out, a large bit of
netscape got paged out also, which I was actually using. So it had to
page a bit before the scrollbar worked, then some for the back button,
etc :). The problem is not so much that the swapping was bad, as the
AMOUNT of swapping that was done; the page-cache should have been shrunk
also, I think.
Usually, though, after recovering from such an episode, the system
feels quite nice with 9.5Mb or so swapped to disk.... evidently thats
the portion of memory that wasn't used much.
> I agree a "free" report like the above can be alarming. However, the
> important things you need to compare with previous releases are
> a) How snappy interactive performance felt
> b) How quickly the "background" task of updating your Debian system
> completed
b) So, the upgrade that was causing the swapping took a bit longer.The
fact is the page-cache simply wasn't being used. It was just sitting
there taking up 33% of my RAM. So, normally, disk usage is reserved for
writes instead of writes plus paging in and out.
a) Interactive performance went DOWN. Netscape had to do some
page-ins to respond to anything :)
-BenRI
P.S. I take it that its OK to Cc people like this even if they're on
linux-kernel? Or is that bad form?
-- If E. Coli was a computer: "OPERON.DLL: Mutation in LACTOSE.DLL. Entire system halted."Benjamin Redelings I <>< http://sdcc13.ucsd.edu/~bredelin
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