Swap not working?

[impee]

Hi everyone,

I have a question with regards to SWAP.

I don't know too much about linux and swap to be able to sort this out myself, hence need some advice.

From what I have seen my server (which is always collecting lots of data) is using about 98% Physical Memory constant (which is possible), to be honest it has 4gb installed, but i have failed to get the OS to recognise it, but never mind, thats a differnt story.

If you look at the below, it shows that even though physical is being hammered, it isn't using the swap, well only a few k of memory.

1) Is there any way to change when the Physical allows SWAP to take over and share the load? Or does SWAP only start to take load when physical is at 100%?

2) any recommendations about this scenario?

many thanks.

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# more /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/sda3 / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
/dev/sdb6 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/sdb5 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/hda /media/cdrom0 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0
/dev/hdf /media/cdrom1 iso9660 ro,user,noauto 0 0

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# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 905404 894760 10644 0 81720 679392
-/+ buffers/cache: 133648 771756
Swap: 6052204 416 6051788

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[japlha]

Swap space will be used if no physical memory is available or if least used pages get replaced with more often used pages.
You wouldn't want swap to take over or share the load since RAM is faster than hard drives.
Swap cannot equal the speed of RAM but it's needed for a system to perform optimally. The OS should know how to use swap space efficiently.