causeless swap usage

ijanos · 2009-07-04 07:43:17

Hi!

I noticed a performance hit lately when I am using my machine for a few hours, the cause was easy to find: it is swapping. The strange thing here that is my physical memory is not nearly full and it even swaps processes that i'm currently using, for eg. causing tab switching in firefox to be a pain.
Anyone else experiencing this?

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           738        730          8          0          1        341
-/+ buffers/cache:        387        351
Swap:          486        164        321

mikesd · 2009-07-04 07:57:52

I don't really see any swap usage on any of my machines. Memory is cheap these days. 730 Meg is a fair sized chunk of memory. I would keep a htop or top instance open and try to spot what is using that much memory. It might take a while to build up so check it every now and then to see how your memory usage is going.

ijanos · 2009-07-04 08:23:51

its and old laptop, the ram is already increased from 256megs. I have a little thingy which shows me the currently used physical mem, and nowdays its not going up to 400megabytes, my system starts swapping at around 320megs.

R00KIE · 2009-07-04 10:18:31

Try fiddling with the swapiness value http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=45507

ijanos · 2009-07-04 10:43:34

reduced it to 15, nothing happaned. swap is still being used too much.
lets try with 0, i will report

ijanos · 2009-07-05 19:10:33

Semi-solved: my bet is X is leaking memory, and with lower swapiness it stayed in the RAM, as cached data, not leaving space for my apps.
I set swappines to 100, now my swap is almost full, but my system is much more responsive, dont ask me why.
Currently im only running firefox and pidigin (in openbox) so whats using 300megs of swap is a myth (my bet it is Xorg) but since its sitting on my disk and not in the physical RAM, the running processes' response time is back to normal.

broch · 2009-07-06 12:50:07

Try fiddling with the swapiness value http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=45507

maybe users stop suggesting swappiness as a solution? his has absolutely nothing to do with performance gain or reducing swapping.

Of course if swapping is happening there are (only) two possibilities:
1) increase (not decrease!) swappiness
2) increase RAM

third would be trying to find similar app to the one causing problems that will use less RAM

Arch Linux

#1 2009-07-04 07:43:17

causeless swap usage

#2 2009-07-04 07:57:52

Re: causeless swap usage

#3 2009-07-04 08:23:51

Re: causeless swap usage

#4 2009-07-04 10:18:31

Re: causeless swap usage

#5 2009-07-04 10:43:34

Re: causeless swap usage

#6 2009-07-05 19:10:33

Re: causeless swap usage

#7 2009-07-06 12:50:07

Re: causeless swap usage

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