Having some amount of swap used does not mean the machine is swapping.
   It could have just paged out some anon memory that is not in use. If
   I look at top output of my otherwise totally idle alpha that's been
   up for weeks, there's something like 10-20 megs of swap used. The OS
   has just decided at some point that it needs to swap out something,
   and there's been no need to swap anything back (think idle gettys
   and stuff like that).


exactly.  check the "pi/po" columns from "vmstat 1".  that will tell
you how many VM pages are paged in/out each second.  at <4MB swap
used, i'd guess you generally won't see anything here.


.mrg.