Re: Using swap though there's plenty of mem free

[Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost>]

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 02:36:43AM +0200, Jonathan Schleifer wrote:
> Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> > Nonsense.  To begin with, you're confusing paging and swapping.  I
> > would be astonished to see that your http server process actually got
> > _swapped_ out, and I wonder why you think it did.
> 
> It really was swapped out. Why I think that? Because top showed swap
> being used. After pkill -u _lighttpd, the free mem didn't change, but
> less swap was used.

Certainly you have demonstrated that pages from the program in question
used space on your system's swap partition.  However, what you write
above says precisely nothing about whether they went out one at a time
-- normal demand paging -- or all at once (process swapping).

Thor