From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jun 20 18:24:31 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9253E16A41C for ; Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:24:31 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 58F3B43D1D for ; Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:24:31 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.13.1/8.13.3) id j5KIOUoI046545; Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:24:30 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 13:24:30 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: Francisco Reyes Message-ID: <20050620182430.GE8497@dan.emsphone.com> References: <20050620141439.S36309@zoraida.natserv.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20050620141439.S36309@zoraida.natserv.net> X-OS: FreeBSD 5.4-STABLE X-message-flag: Outlook Error User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.9i Cc: FreeBSD Questions List Subject: Re: When does swap decreases X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 18:24:31 -0000 In the last episode (Jun 20), Francisco Reyes said: > My swap used to be 30MB+ > I increased from 256MB to 384MB. > For several days swap usage was zero. Then I saw it increase to a few > hundred Kbs.. and now it's up to 10MB. > > I am wondering if it's because swap is not going down or there is now that > many more programs running (which I doubt). > > Before the memory upgrade the swap was very steady at 30MB so after a > 128MB memory increase I am a little surprised my swap seems to be > staying around 10MB When the system is low on memory, it will force the least used blocks of memory to swap. It will not free the swap space until the process owning them exits (even if it pages that memory back into RAM), so at some point the system paged out 30MB of memory, some processes exited and freed up 20MB, and you probably have some long-lived processes that account for that remaining 10MB. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com