[NTLUG:Discuss] controlling swapping

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, 16 Nov 1999 21:41:02 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
David Camm <bbai at onramp.net>  asked about swapping...

Question:  Is there any actual problem resulting from there being some
pages swapped out?

The newer versions are reportedly more "aggressive" about pushing things
out to swap; the system will make some use of swap sometimes in favor
of having more cache.

You're reporting that there is swap space in use; that is quite different
from the usual use of the phrase "the system is swapping;" in the case
of what you appear to be experiencing, some swap space is in use...  

The usual usage of "system is swapping" is to indicate that the system
is spending much of its resources on swapping, which tends to result in
extremely high load averages and the computer making noises as the disk
drive heads are moving continually.

My suspicion is that you're trying to tune something that likely doesn't
matter too much...

And I also suspect that the only people that know the control of
the parameters are those that call certain programmers "Linus,"
"Ted," "Alan," and "David"...
--
[In response to deprecations of the use of <linux/*.h>]  ...I prefer code 
that only compiles on Linux... I really don't care to help other
operating systems grow.  -- Albert D. Cahalan <acahalan at saturn.cs.uml.edu> 
cbbrowne at hex.net -  <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>