Accumulating swap over time

[John Francis]

On 30/12/05, Douglas Phillipson <phillipd at oem.doe.gov> wrote:
> Running FC4 kernel 2.6.14-1.1653_FC4smp.  I seem to accumulate a large
> amount of swap over time.  (A few days.  I'm not running any unusual
> apps.  My memory stastics (xosview) says I have gobs of free memory but
> after a while, even with a gig or more of free RAM my swap goes up to
> several hundred megabytes and things slow way down.  The disk swaps
> madly and then backs off for a while.  It seems to be cyclic in nature
> but the swap never goes away until a reboot.  At all times I have in
> excess of a gig of free RAM.  The only apps I'm running are Firefox,
> Thunderbird, openoffice 2.0, perhaps a music player on this machine
> under KDE 3.5.0.

Run top in a terminal and then type 'M' (that's a shift-m) to order
the processes by memory usage.  Should give you an idea of what's
going on.

--
Kind regards,

John Francis