Re: tlug: Caldera Japanese version (more comments)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Scott" == Scott M Stone <sstone@example.com> writes:

    Scott> yeah, I think most of us understand THIS part... but why
    Scott> does my computer still report 41MB of swap used when it's
    Scott> got 45MB of RAM free and virtually nothing running?

Probably because it doesn't know whether the stuff in swap is actually 
in use or not.  You can check it (I'm sure you can do a better job of
writing the script ;-)

# you should probably be running `top' in a stays-on-top window ;-)
for i in `seq 0 $SIZE_OF_VM_IN_MB'; do
 kterm -e free &
 sleep 2
done
# now close all those kterms and do it again
for i in `seq 0 $SIZE_OF_VM_IN_MB'; do
 kterm -e free &
 sleep 2
done

    Scott> Or is it just putting off the garbage collection until such
    Scott> time as it actually *really* needs the swap (making this a,
    Scott> "I wish Linux would report its stats better" issue instead
    Scott> of a, "Linux is leaking swap" issue :) )..

I think this is probably the case.  I suspect that the stuff in swap
is intentionally not garbage collected, but why not I can't say.

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