[CentOS] Swap

[Kai Schaetzl]

Feizhou wrote on Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:54:26 +0800:

> Yeah but with that patch that changed the vm system behaviour, setting 
> swappiness to 0 had ZERO effect. The kernel happily swapped out what 
> data it could from programs that were running.

But you apparently need some additional environmental condition for this 
to happen. I see normal behavior as ever with my 4.3. After boot it slowly 
fills up memory until less than 50 MB is left. If the machine is scarce on 
memory it even gets almost to zero physical mem left. swap file usage 
stays at a few 100k. I don't have desktop machines, only servers. I 
suspect that the problematic behavior occurs only when you close 
applications. In that case it might swap the diskcache of the closed 
application out instead of keeping it in RAM. On a server this doesn't 
happen, you have your applications running continuously and no big memory 
eaters that don't run all the time - well there are exceptions, of course.

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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