Does it make sense to have the kernel use a swap partition?

Tim Schmidt timschmidt at gmail.com
Thu Jul 24 18:57:34 CEST 2008


On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:48 PM, Jim Colton <jimcolt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for writing Andy.
>
> I see about 12M of 128M left while only Terminal-2 and the Dialer are
> running.

You're not subtracting buffered and cached data.  Linux aggressively
buffers written data and caches read data for potential future use.
This data is easily evicted from ram (usually without requiring
anything to be written to more permanent storage), thus not negatively
affecting performance.

For various reasons, Linux's accounting of how much ram is in use
isn't quite accurate, but you'll get a much closer number by running
'free' in the terminal and looking at the "-/+ buffers/cache" line.

--tim




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