On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 8:49 AM, Iain Buchanan <iai...@netspace.net.au> wrote: > Hi, > > over the last week or so I've noticed unusually large swap usage. I > usually hibernate this laptop and have uptimes up to 12 days so apps can > run for a long time. I don't usually use any swap space (except for a > few k). > > If I swapoff and swapon, the usage falls back to zero but then creeps up > again over a few days. > > $ free -m > total used free shared buffers cached > Mem: 3040 859 2181 0 38 415 > -/+ buffers/cache: 406 2634 > Swap: 494 431 62 >
Looking at above values 494MB does not seem to be enough for hibernation. Do you add extra swap or close some apps before hibernation? If your system trying to fill up your swap while you have more than 2GB of main memory available, only thing I can think of is your swapiness is set very high. You check and alter is as follows $ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and # echo N > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness where N is a value between 0 and 100. Higher number means more swapping. If I had 3GB of ram I would set it to something closer to 0 or even 0 if I am just gonna use it for hibernation. > nothing unusual there, except for the swap usage itself. 'top' doesn't > show any large apps. sorted by mem the top 4 are: > PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND > 8318 iain 20 0 494m 150m 21m S 0 5.0 1:20.67 evolution > 20424 iain 20 0 342m 77m 30m S 0 2.5 0:01.84 firefox > 8009 root 20 0 83364 37m 6260 S 7 1.2 38:34.31 X > 8090 iain 20 0 159m 32m 1600 S 1 1.1 3:48.08 skype > > Hm, I just noticed Mem is in %. % of what? % total or % used? Even if > it was % of total RAM that could be as much as 152Mb for evo and 76Mb > for firefox. Not that much really. > % of total main memory excluding swap because its rather difficult to take it into account. 3040*0.05 = 152 evolution > any ideas? > You can try to view swap usage on top by pressing f then p and enter and sort by it by F then P and enter. The values wont be very realistic though. Alternatively you could try is to compare resident memory usages before and after swapoff. Given the mem usage of your apps, total mem usage looks normal. What does not seem normal is that swap inclined mem usage. Seriously take a look at your swapiness value. The default value cannot be right every particular case. > thanks :) > -- > Iain Buchanan <iaindb at netspace dot net dot au> > > Chuck Norris once skewered a man with the Eiffel tower. > > > -- Fatih
