[PLUG] Swap usage keeps increasing

Wil Cooley wcooley at nakedape.cc
Thu Mar 25 13:36:01 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-03-25 at 13:24, Vincent Yau wrote:

> Is there any reason why the Mem usage is always almost 90% of the total 
> size?
> On some of these boxes, I don't have anything special running (other than 
> whatever
> is needed to keep the box going).  At most, I have mysqld, tomcat, apache 
> httpd
> and that is it.....

Free memory is wasted memory.  Any memory not used recently by a running
program is used by the kernel as filesystem cache or other buffers. 
Part of the black magic of VM subsystems is deciding when to free memory
used by processes in preference of filesystem cache.  It's frightfully
difficult to make the right decisions.

A small amount of memory is generally kept free to prevent memory
fragmentation, for basically the same reasons a small amount of
filesystem space is reserved to prevent filesystem fragmentation.

Wil
-- 
Wil Cooley                                 wcooley at nakedape.cc
Naked Ape Consulting                        http://nakedape.cc
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