Re: [gentoo-user] swap usage creeping up

[Dale]

Iain Buchanan wrote:
> Hi,
>
> over the last week or so I've noticed unusually large swap usage.  I
> usually hibernate this laptop and have uptimes up to 12 days so apps can
> run for a long time.  I don't usually use any swap space (except for a
> few k).
>
> If I swapoff and swapon, the usage falls back to zero but then creeps up
> again over a few days.
>
> $ free -m
>               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          3040        859       2181          0         38        415
> -/+ buffers/cache:        406       2634
> Swap:          494        431         62
>
> nothing unusual there, except for the swap usage itself.  'top' doesn't
> show any large apps.  sorted by mem the top 4 are:
>    PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
>   8318 iain      20   0  494m 150m  21m S    0  5.0   1:20.67 evolution
> 20424 iain      20   0  342m  77m  30m S    0  2.5   0:01.84 firefox
>   8009 root      20   0 83364  37m 6260 S    7  1.2  38:34.31 X
>   8090 iain      20   0  159m  32m 1600 S    1  1.1   3:48.08 skype
>
> Hm, I just noticed Mem is in %.  % of what?  % total or % used?  Even if
> it was % of total RAM that could be as much as 152Mb for evo and 76Mb
> for firefox.  Not that much really.
>
> any ideas?
>
> thanks :)
>


I ran into this a while back and noticed that a setting got changed and 
I didn't know about it.   Still no idea what changed it but you can 
check the setting with this:

root@smoker / # cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
20
root@smoker / #

The lower the number, the less often it will use swap.  I have swap on 
some slow drives and 2Gbs of ram so I don't want swap used unless it 
will keep me from crashing.  You can use echo to change the setting and 
I actually added this to rc.conf to set it at bootup:

echo 20 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

May not be the problem but worth checking into at least.

Dale

:-)  :-)