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

Tue Jun 6 17:20:12 UTC 2006
Sam Drinkard <sam at wa4phy.net>


Kai Schaetzl wrote:

>Sam Drinkard wrote on Mon, 05 Jun 2006 19:55:09 -0400:
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>>According to man ps
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>Ah, I read man top and was wondering where they got definitions ... :-)
>
>Kai
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Doing more reading and such, but haven't really gleaned much more info, 
but I do have another question.  According to ps, processes that are 
swapped out to disk are shown by brackets.  That being the case, when I 
turn swap off and do a ps, I still see  a lot of programs (insead of 
processes, per man ps)  that are bracketed.  Given there is no swap, I 
wonder why ps reports them as being swapped out?  The behavior with 
swappiness set to 0 is OK, but this morning when I looked at things, I 
see where during the night, swap usage went from 2.2 mb to 221 mb., and 
I assume due to the nightly cron jobs, i.e., slocate, updatedb, etc.  
The actual processes I'm concerned about run during the time period that 
the cron jobs run too, so maybe the machine did at some point, hit OOM 
state, but hard to say without being here to look.

So, back to the question ... is ps man page wrong or have I read 
something into the text that I am mis interpreting?

Sam