From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Jul 24 17:10:29 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA26450 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:10:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from thompson.ebay.com (thompson.ebay.com [206.86.127.205]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA26445 for ; Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:10:28 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [204.156.155.180] (pierre.vip.best.com [204.156.155.180]) by thompson.ebay.com (8.7.5/8.6.12) with SMTP id RAA19620 for ; Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:10:25 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:13:12 -0700 To: questions@freebsd.org From: pierre@ebay.com (Pierre Omidyar) Subject: Stupid Swap Question Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hello folks, I am running 2.1.5, from the stable supfile release, and my question is about swap space: The system has 64M of RAM, and 262M of swap space, split across two disk partitions, on separate disks. While watching `top' run, I have not been able to catch the system using any swap space at all. In fact, I have seen the Memory Free field go down to as low as 114K, with no swap usage. (top reports: "Swap: 262M Total, 262M Free", and swapinfo, pstat -s, etc., report the same thing.) What makes me worry more about this is that at those times, my httpd server, apache 1.1.1, is unable to spawn child processes for cgi scripts, and writes errors to its log file, as well as giving server error messages to my users. No errors are written to /var/log/messages, however. This memory problem then quick corrects itself, because apache stops running scripts, and the memory free climbs back up to several meg. I am not convinced that the apache problem with spawning child processes is related to the behavior I'm seeing with swap, but it does seem likely. Has anyone seen similar problems with swap? Cheers, Pierre