swap partition unused

[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

[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