On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 19:52 -0400, Sam Drinkard wrote:
William L. Maltby wrote:
I need to look more into it, but before I start the long and arduous "googling my life away" process, I figured someone might know the answer. I've read the man pages several times and they didn't change! :-(
As normal, while looking at one thing, something else bites my butt. I tuned on the swap field in top and sort on it. Here's an edited snippet of the results.
Mem: 775708k total, 764752k used, 10956k free, 60780k buffers Swap: 1572856k total, 160k used, 1572696k free, 377324k cached
PID VIRT RES SHR %MEM SWAP COMMAND 24729 127m 32m 15m 4.3 94m evolution 3409 97220 5268 4304 0.7 89m evolution-data-
<snip>
Now, if I treat all those numbers ending in "m" as megabytes, it doesn't take long to see that I've been lied to somewhere along the way. Or alternatively, I'm dense and "Just Don't Get It" (TM).
Any help?
Looked at the same top info, and I don't understand what I see either. With processes running, I'm seeing close to 500mb of stuff swapped out, but according to free, only the 2.2 mb is swapped. There's gotta be more to this than meets the eye, or something is lying about the swap. The system monitor also shows only 2.2mb of swap in use, so where is top getting this 500+ mb of swap data from?
I suspect Kai and Les have hit on it. I first thought it sounded like a bug, now it may be only a "bug" in documentation not telling it like it is.
<snip sig stuff>
I'll tell you one theory I had earlier today. What if the summary line was reporting "pages" swapped? At 4K/page time 160,000 it cam awful close to matching the total of all the individual entries under the "SWAP" column. I had though I was onto something. If someone's on an arch with other than 4K page size, ...
It was tempting, yes it was. Fortunately, I decided to *ask* rather than *propose*. So I seem only half as much and idiot as I might have seemed (I hope)!