[Klug-general] Swapfiles

[Peter Childs]

On 10/08/06, Matthew Macdonald-Wallace <matthew at truthisfreedom.org.uk> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've just setup my home sever which acts as both a firewall/router and a
> webserver for testing sites.  I've just looked at the output from "top"
> and it's showing that I've only got about 7MB of physical RAM left for
> use, (out of 512MB!) however my 1GB Swap partition isn't even being used
> (about 224K)!
>
> Is there any way I can get apache or any other process on the system
> (They're mainly dynamic websites using PHP/MySQL, so I think this could
> be the issue!) to use swap more than Physical RAM so that I don't keep
> suffering from these windows-like service outages caused by the memory
> filling up?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Matt
>

You've probably only just booted and nothing is in need of more
memory. Leave it a day or even just a couple of hours and look again,
Swap may or may not be in use (if its not in use the computer has
needed to use it) buffers will probably have grown (due to more files
and stuff in use) I've never yet seen a linux machine suffering from
"running" out of memory like windows, because linux has better memory
allocation than windows, The only problem I've ever had is programs
with memory leaks but they only caused problems becuase the computer
really did run out of processor time to find enough memory (including
swap) most people have to much swap these days. mostly due to the size
of modern had disks,

Peter