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

Nils R Grotnes nils.grotnes at gmail.com
Thu Jul 24 20:14:12 CEST 2008


Hi Tim.

> 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.

Htop is quite good at showing all three uses of memory, well worth a look.

Don't know how accurate it is though. Any thoughts on that?

Nils




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