Quote:> And for the swapping problem:
> I've got a 486-66 w/ 16mb RAM and a 5mb SWAP partition. I had a background
> script logging the /proc/meminfo every 5 seconds while I ran X and
> loaded it up with those goofy games and whatnot. Eventually, no more windows
> could be opened, and upon returning to the shell, I noticed that
> ram used was near 16mb, while swap used was 0!! It says that there is
> 5megs of swap, 0 used, 5megs free! Why doesn't it use the swap device?
> (Yes, it's mounted from fstab)
Did you figure out why no more windows could be opened? There
are a few reasons I can think of:
1) You're out of pty's -- I think there are only 16 for Linux
and no one ever answers questions on how to increase them.
2) You're out of processes. 64 is the max number the standard
Linux distribution can have open. I think this can be
adjusted with NR_TASKS in include/linux/tasks.h and
recompiling the kernel. (There might be other things
to do, so search the archives or repost for instructions).
Other things that may not be as you think:
3) You didn't install the swap correctly. It's not mounted,
but swapon'ed. A command 'swapon -a' will activate all
the swap files in /etc/fstab. Check this with free, which
should report something like (this is the kmem free)
size used cache free shared
memory: 15284 3748 10832 704 2540
swap0: 10396 0 10396 0
total: 25680 3748 10832 11100 2540
4) You're reading used and free space wrong. (Kmem) Used is the
measure of how much is used by the processes. Free really
includes the memory allocated to cache (which can be used by more
processes). Below is what /proc/meminfo says which matches
the above free command. You have to subtract buffers from
the used to get the amount used by the processes.
total: used: free: shared: buffers:
Mem: 15650816 14934016 716800 2592768 10547200
Swap: 10645504 0 10645504
So in reality:
Kmem free space = size - used
Proc free space = total - ( used - buffers)
by