[kde-linux] VM and Swap problems

[Randy Kramer]

On Monday 29 January 2007 01:20 am, James Richard Tyrer wrote:
> Esben Mose Hansen wrote:
> > On Sunday 28 January 2007 18:33:39 Randy Kramer wrote:
> > 
> >>> The VM and swap work fine till the swap space is half full.  But, after
> >>> swap is half full the system starts removing swap until it is exactly
> >>> half full.  When this happens, the VM system starts to thrash and the
> >>> system won't do anything till the thrashing stops.

Not that it really matters, but somewhere along the line (a previous post, not 
this one) the attribution got mixed up--I believe the above was actually 
written by James.
 
> > 512Mb swap? That's a fair amount of swapspace, more than you should need 
for 
> > desktop use. Maybe one of your applications leak memory (I have a webpage 
> > that makes konqueror leak insane amount of memory). Try checking with top 
> > what applications use lots of memory.
> 
> I know what is using most of the space.  Each time you open another 
> window or tab in Konqueror, it needs a lot of memory.  So, if you open 
> half a dozen, or so, Konqueror windows each with half a dozen tabs, or 
> so, it uses a lot of memory which is swapped out.

+1 (Other applications that use a lot of space (and seem to have memory leaks, 
in that they use more and more memory even if you close pages (or similar) 
until you actually close the application): Firefox, Opera, kmail, 
net-monitor)

> What I need is to use over half of my swap space.

I hadn't quite looked at it that way, but essentially that would help me as 
well.  (But even without looking at it that way, that was somewhere behind my 
idea of increasing the swap--increase it so half the swap is all you (I) 
need. ;-)

regards,
Randy Kramer

PS: And I guess that's one of the design decisions in Linux that I don't 
understand--why does swapping (well, thrashing or something) in Linux seem to 
increase when swap is half full?  And, is that a good design decision for 
perhaps a server but not a desktop?