How to check if swap is working?

[Steven Ringwald]

Daniel B. Thurman wrote:

>
>
>Errrr....  I show that I do have the swap partition loaded with
>available swap space showing however I see that 0 swap is being
>used.  Is this normal?
>
>How do I test to see if swap will work when needed?  I see
>no activity at this time....
>
Linux tries not to use swap unless it has to.
To see swap being used, you could try exhausting your RAM with a 
ramdisk, filling the disk, and then trying to run a program...

Assuming you have 1GB of RAM...

mount -ttmpfs -osize=1024m /mnt /mnt
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt

Now you ought to have stuff in swap like mad. :-)

Hope this gets you the info you need.
Steve