Matt Herzog <mherzog@mediaone.net> writes:
> I hit swap for the first time ever last night on my 1386 box.  What I can't
> understand is, I had not yet exhausted my physical ram.  In fact, I was only
> using ~64 MB of ram out of 128 MB total. I have never seen this system use
> more than 80 MB of its ram under any circumstance and again, I have never
> seen it using any swap until last night.

The VM subsystem doesn't wait until you're totally out of memory to
try cleaning things up -- it has a target number of free pages it
tries to keep available.

Also, you might not be getting perfectly accurate information on RAM
usage -- what were you using to measure it?

> If I had been running procfs, might I have learned something?

Not particularly -- it doesn't provide any tools that aren't usually
available.

> I should mention I'm running a 1.5.3 ALPHA build.

Pretty old...

--
Perry E. Metzger		perry@wasabisystems.com
--
NetBSD Development, Support & CDs. http://www.wasabisystems.com/