[CentOS] Swap memory: I can't reconcile this stuff.

Tue Jun 6 01:44:28 UTC 2006
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>

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On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 09:20:14PM -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
> > 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)!

Both theories sound very plausible to me. But since I never heard of
any userspace program using "pages" as a unit, I'm tending more toward
the one Kai and Les proposed. Not entirely discarting yours, tho.

- -- 
Rodrigo Barbosa <rodrigob at suespammers.org>
"Quid quid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur"
"Be excellent to each other ..." - Bill & Ted (Wyld Stallyns)

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