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To: "Frode Nordahl" <froden@bigblue.no>
cc: "isp@FreeBSD.org" <isp@FreeBSD.org>
Subject: Re: Huh? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 24 Sep 1996 05:54:52."
             <199609240445.GAA06956@login.bigblue.no> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 00:05:46 -0700
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>What's this?
>
>------ (top)
>Mem: 24M Active, 1352K Inact, 6000K Wired, 19M Cache, 6076K Buf, 12M Free
>Swap: 56M Total, 7012K Used, 49M Free, 12% Inuse
>------ (top)
>
>19 MB Cache, 12 MB Free ram, still, it swapps...  Why is that??

   It simply means that the system has pushed out some dirty pages during a
time that the system required lots of memory. Whatever caused that demand has
gone away now, but the pages are still stored in swap so that they may
possibly be used again (the in-core copies reclaimed without having to re-page
them out...assuming they aren't modified again).

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project