On Wed, Feb 15, 2006, Shlomi Shalem wrote about "RE: Swap problem":
> Hey all,
> First of all I want to thank you for your answers. I did the next things:
> * I checked my initiation scripts, and 'swapon -a' appears there.
> * My swap partition is perfectly defined in my '/etc/fstab'.
Instead of checking if the swap *should* be properly configured, you'd better
just checked if it *is* propertly configured. Run "swapon -s", and you should
see something like:
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hda2 partition 3076436 126068 -1
(which means that on my system hda2 is currently enabled as a swap partition;
It has 3 GB, out of which only 126 MB are currently used).
> were right, only 110MB are used out of 256MB.
> * My swap partition is always empty. Seems a little strange for me anyway...
If you have a lot (say, 1 GB and above) of main memory, and you're not running
a lot of memory-hungry applications (like OpenOffice, Firefox and Eclipse),
this might not be so strange.
> Well, it seems that everything works just fine. Yet, my computer is
> running very (very!) slow. I had Linux on this computer before which
> included older kernel and a lot more packages and progrmas running in
> the back, and it was a lot faster...
> What else can I do or check?
If your swap is *not* being used, this is hardly a reason for the machine
to slow down - except for one issue: file caching in memory becomes less
effective because the machine cannot swap out useless stuff from memory and
use the memory for something more important, like caching frequently used
files. You can look at the outout of "free", at the "cached" column. If
you see there something close to 0, you're in trouble. If you see there
something like 100 MB, then you probably do not have a problem with too
little caching.
Also, you can try running something like
vmstat 10 10
the output of this command will let you know how much swapping activity and
IO is currently being done. Maybe the computer's slowness is somehow related
to a lot of IO being done, for some reason.
Also, could it be that something else changed in your software configuration?
For example, could it be that you replaced some old lean-and-mean window
manager with one of the new "monsters" that runs dozens of daemons in the
backgrounds? Try "ps aux" and see what sort of crap is running in the
background.
Finally, what does "uptime" show as a load average? If it's not close to
0.00, then something is constantly running on your machine - which is an
obvious reason for it to become slower.
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