Description of problem: IMHO the following kernel behaviour is broken: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3960936 3812156 148780 0 195840 3054716 -/+ buffers/cache: 561600 3399336 Swap: 1048552 64 1048488 $ Why the hell does the kernel start swapping when 148780k free and 3054716k cached? Okay, currently only 64k are swapped but this is unnecessary when 148780k are free, isn't it? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 How reproducible: Put 4 GB of RAM into a server and rebuild gcc, no swapping. Let the box run it's normal services (httpd, vsftpd, sshd etc.) with low use (< 0.25 load) after it - without rebooting the box between - and see what I posted above. Actual results: Kernel starts swapping when 148780k free/3054716k cached Expected results: Swapping first when RAM is completely used...
Based on the date this bug was created, it appears to have been reported against rawhide during the development of a Fedora release that is no longer maintained. In order to refocus our efforts as a project we are flagging all of the open bugs for releases which are no longer maintained. If this bug remains in NEEDINFO thirty (30) days from now, we will automatically close it. If you can reproduce this bug in a maintained Fedora version (7, 8, or rawhide), please change this bug to the respective version and change the status to ASSIGNED. (If you're unable to change the bug's version or status, add a comment to the bug and someone will change it for you.) Thanks for your help, and we apologize again that we haven't handled these issues to this point. The process we're following is outlined here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/F9CleanUp We will be following the process here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping to ensure this doesn't happen again.
Hum? Since when is Rawhide no longer maintained? The problem still exists in Rawhide.
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA. More information and reason for this action is here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping
I believe what you're seeing is the effect of the swap cache. Where something was swapped out briefly (whilst there was memory pressure), and we keep references to the swapped out version on disk just in case the situation reoccurs, so that we don't have to write it out to swap a second time, we just throw out the in-memory references.