Why would my server be swapping...

[Tommy Reynolds]

Uttered Wouter van Vliet <wouter.van.vliet at gmail.com>, spake thus:

>Crappy intro, huh? Anyway, I've got a question - bit of an oddity I
>noticed in the output to the "free" command. I'll post that output
>before I continue:
>
>             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
>Mem:        515536     196040     319496          0      22448     120144
>-/+ buffers/cache:      53448     462088
>Swap:      1052248     151476     900772
>
>Hope the mail brings it over nice and columny. Anyway, what it shows
>is 311 megabytes of free memory and 147MB used swap space. Isn't that
>a bit odd, and shouldn't the server only be swapping when all (or at
>least most) of the RAM is in use?

Nope, not odd at all.  The kernel does "anticipatory swapping" by
moving VM pages out that haven't been used in a while: this is called
"buffer aging".  This is a "good thing" because it helps the kernel
have more free memory ready for a burst of activity in the future.

No worries, mate.
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