Re: need help interpreting 'free' output.

Mike Fedyk (mfedyk@matchmail.com)
Tue, 30 Oct 2001 03:46:23 -0800

On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 12:32:52PM +0100, Frank Dekervel wrote:
> so now there is 220 meg used memory right ?
> and the memory is definitely used, because as soon as i start a memory hog
> the system hits swap ...
>
> so what am i missing here ?
> should i provide more info about my kernel configuration ? vmstat numbers ?
>

Ahh, are you a new convert from a 2.2 kernel?

In 2.4 the kernel will swap out much earlier to make room for the running
programs, and disk cache. This is normal.

Earlier 2.4 kernels didn't do so well, but I won't go into detail because
there is already enough about that in the archives...

When you watch vmstat, if you see a lot of swapping traffic without much
good reason, then you should probably report something...

Mike
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