Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 61007
Weird swap usage / swap reporting?
Last modified: 2008-08-01 12:22:52 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.0.3 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020214 Description of problem: If I leave apache running for a specific ammount of time it starts eating into swap. So every once in a while I login stop apache and swapoff. Here's where it gets weird. Once apache is stopped it'll report N MB of free memory, but once I swapoff it reports _more_ free memory. I would assume since the kernel has to page the swap into memory there should be less free memory. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. start apache + php4 (or postgresql) 2. serve 1M page views/day ;) 3. stop apache and swapoff (watch memory reporting before/after the swapoff) Actual Results: Here is some output for you. usw-sf-web4:~# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1027860 349584 678276 0 9528 15448 -/+ buffers/cache: 324608 703252 Swap: 2056304 285372 1770932 usw-sf-web4:~# swapoff -a usw-sf-web4:~# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 1027860 69252 958608 0 9568 15456 -/+ buffers/cache: 44228 983632 Swap: 0 0 0 Expected Results: I would assum that the ammout of free memory should decrease, or that the inital ammout was really more than it says. I have seen this behavior now on 5 systems, 4 webservers and 1 database server (postgresql) Additional info:
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