justquick

i installed the newest version of slackware with a swap partition that is double my ram size yesterday. It used the swap at first but now when i execute top it shows that slackware isnt using any of the swap space. Is this normal? Or will it only use the swap if it is desperately low on ram?

jaboua

Yes, it will try to keep as much as possible in ram, but if the ram isn't sufficient, it will start writing to swap. The first time I actually saw my swap beeing used where when my system was up compiling in two days and nights, and then it had used about 250MB swap...

justquick

thats what i thought but my computer is a streaming media server for my college and it is constantly used. But still the swap isnt being used despite its using 500 out of my 512 memory.[/code]

jaboua

Well, I had 256 MB ram and 550 MB swap when I was compiling, so I guess that it will have to stream for a while before it runs out of memory > write to swap... Yeah, yeah. Leaving the swap unused is just a good thing

Krendoshazin

make sure you've enabled the partition with 'swapon -a /dev/hda', replace /dev/hda with the partition name of your swap partition, you can find this out with 'fdisk -l' which you'll need to be root to use

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zba78

Don't worry. In all the time I've used linux I've new seen my swap partition used.

In fact after installing a new distro I forgot to add an entry into fstab for swap so I ran the distro for a few weeks without any swap at all. Everything worked fine

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