Swap usage always goes up never down 4490

On Fri, 19 Aug 2005 15:25:31 +0100, Chris

Anything's possible but you aren't describing obvious symptoms of it on your system, so it doesn't look like something you should be concerned about.

You needn't be concerned about 70Mb swap still being used either. As others have explained, swapped out apps will not be swapped back in unless they're needed, for good reason. No doubt that 70Mb is comprised of various parts of system, kde and X apps-libraries-daemons-services that aren't currently being used - they are your "what else to kill", but I wouldn't suggest killing any of them - you don't seem to have any other dire need for the memory and most of them are probably performing essential or very useful jobs.

Given that free is showing that you have 403Mb available after removing buffers and cache from the tally, if you had administrative rights you could force the swapped out processes to be moved back into physical memory with a swapoff followed by a swapon. Even if this value were not 403Mb and instead were less than the 70Mb in your swap, memory would be reclaimed from least-recently-used (or by some other algorithm - I'm not familiar enough with the kernel internals to know which) parts of buffers and cache. But really, why do that? It's been swapped out for good reason - it's not being used. The physical memory is much better reserved for buffers and cache - which will improve performance - rather than forced to hold unused parts of applications.

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