Re: VMM - freeing up swap space

Richard B. Johnson (root@chaos.analogic.com)
Tue, 18 Jun 2002 12:56:57 -0400 (EDT)


On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, DevilKin wrote:

> On Tuesday 18 June 2002 17:10, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> > On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Gregory Giguashvili wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > Running an application allocating huge amounts of memory would push some
> > > data from RAM to swap area. After the application terminates, swap area
> > > is usually still occupied.
> > >
> > > Is there any way to clean up the swap area by pushing the data back to
> > > RAM?
> > >
> > > Thanks in advance
> > > Giga
> >
> > Sure. Execute `swapoff -a`, followed by `swapon -a`. This is no joke.
>
> Hmm. Now if you happen to get out of memory during the swapoff part, you'll
> get the OO killer on your tail? Or will the system just go freeze solid?
>
> Just a small question.

I think `swapoff -a` will just fail to remove the swap device/file(s) if
it doesn't have the memory. I've done this with 16 Mb of RAM in the
'good-old-days', where VM was swap.

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.18 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).

Windows-2000/Professional isn't.

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