William L. Maltby wrote: > On Tue, 2006-06-06 at 13:45 +0800, Feizhou wrote: >> 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! >>>> :-( >>>> >>>> <snip> > >> most of the 'swapped' data is probably sitting in the cache or buffers? >> >> Here is an example: >> >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=129064 > > Thanks to the patience and efforts of all, Rodrigo, Les, Sam, > Feizhou ... I think I've got a handle on this thing. > > The only mistake was turning on "SWAP" in top. > > I can see difficulty in programming to get a *meaningful* swap figure: > that is, one that represents either real swapped memory, or its current > needs or its potential maximum need. That assumes one can make the > decision as to which to show. > > Others already show (apparently) current swap (free, top's summary > lines), so what could one put under the "SWAP" column? I now think that > it was the maximum possible swap needed for each process, as you all > suggested. :) > > Text shared from program segments and libraries, shared data, buffers, > cache, parts already swapped, parts marked for swap but not committed > yet,... What would show under the "swap top"? From a programming POV, > showing anything but the virtual memory use could be complex and have a > tight coupling to the VM implementation details, increasing maintenance > for a little used data column too. > > I am comfortable that "SWAP" only shows the simplest to obtain value and > the only problem is that a better explanation is could be provided in > the man pages for top. Eh? I thought that problem kind of exists for all man pages! > >> <snip sig stuff> > > And we do know that a fix for the lock up in Sam's and my machine is > apparently in the pipeline for U4. If I was a paying customer....