top swap interpretation help?
Dave Stevens
geek at uniserve.com
Mon Mar 30 23:27:13 UTC 2009
On Saturday 28 March 2009 11:25:47 pm Tim wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-03-28 at 12:01 -0700, Dave Stevens wrote:
> > When I run top I sometimes see a figure for swap that seems to be
> > relatively constant. Is it the case that the figure shown is the
> > maximum swap that has been used?
>
> top - 16:54:06 up 1:44, 2 users, load average: 0.41, 0.20, 0.09
> Tasks: 151 total, 3 running, 148 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 12.1%us, 6.7%sy, 14.8%ni, 39.1%id, 26.8%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.3%si,
> 0.0%st Mem: 1034016k total, 644736k used, 389280k free, 22040k
> buffers Swap: 2031608k total, 0k used, 2031608k free, 265412k
> cached
>
> The two "total" amounts, shown immediately above, are the total
> available amounts of memory. How they're being used is written
> alongside.
>
> If you mean something else, you should provide an example.
>
> --
> [tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
> 2.6.27.19-78.2.30.fc9.i686
>
> Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I
> read messages from the public lists.
current example:
top - 16:14:05 up 10 days, 43 min, 1 user, load average: 0.04, 0.13, 0.16
Tasks: 197 total, 3 running, 194 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 5.3%us, 4.1%sy, 0.2%ni, 90.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 4129236k total, 3817620k used, 311616k free, 332628k buffers
Swap: 2031608k total, 84k used, 2031524k free, 1446812k cached
So this shows 2 gigs of swap with 84K used. Fine, But it doesn't show the 84K
in use right after boot time and in fact only shows up after there's been
some especially heavy use of the machine. But it seems to be a kind of
high-water mark. When the level of machine use goes down, even way down, the
swap still shows as being in use and at the same level. I find this
counter-intuitive and think I may be misunderstanding the figure.
Dave
--
Canada must refuse to be entangled in any more wars fought to make the world
safe for capitalism.
-- The Regina Manifesto, 1933
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