[Durham] Swap fills up then out of memory errors

[Dougie Nisbet]

On 18/02/2012 00:47, Nick wrote:
> You're thinking of RAM usage, which may well gradually climb safely
> with cache&  buffers. This is fine, as it's just storing stuff it
> thinks it'll need from the hard drive in RAM, which is much faster,
> but if the system runs low on memory it will just empty those
> caches. You can see them as the 'buffers' and 'cached' entries in
> free.
>
> So your swap gradually filling up is a sign of a memory leak long in
> the making.

yup, I've got that, but just to be clear, the swap is gradually filling 
up even with over 3GB memory free. I'm puzzled about why something 
should swap, even a teensy bit, when there is so much free memory.

Ideally I'm not trying to think a way of monitoring swap increase while 
I try switching things on or off. Things are not helped by me doing a 
swapoff -a followed by a swapon -a, and now the swap in use refuses to 
rise above 0kb!

Dougie