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From: Mel <fbsd.questions@rachie.is-a-geek.net>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Date: Sun, 21 Dec 2008 11:47:27 +0100
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Cc: FreeBSD <freebsd@optiksecurite.com>, Tom Worster <fsb@thefsb.org>
Subject: Re: SOLVED: Simple swap question
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On Friday 19 December 2008 19:04:26 FreeBSD wrote:

> This server is very lightly used, so most of the time if the swap is
> getting used it shows that something is going wrong. This warning
> already proved usefull once, so I don't think I'm going to change it.

Swapping is a symptom of a symptom - or just the machine doing it's job. 

Better let nagios monitor:
- fork rate by observing kern.lastpid sysctl over time
- nr. of processes running
- top 10 processes sorted by resident memory (res not size in top(1))

Those are the actual symptoms of something going wrong that can cause a system 
to start swapping heavily. 3MB swap is not 'heavily' and is nothing to worry 
about.In fact, a high fork rate can DOS a system pretty well, without the 
machine ever going into swap.
-- 
Mel

Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules
    and never get to the software part.