2006-Jan-07

I looked at this a few times before, but still trying to figure out why swap is being used. Today, I added 160 MB to my desktop system that has been running with 128MB for at least five years. I just noticed that top showed:

Memory: 80M Act, 72M Inact, 772K Wired, 20M Exec, 107M File, 65M Free
Swap: 193M Total, 16M Used, 176M Free

And free (from pkgsrc) showed:

total       used       free    buffers
Mem:        282268     216444      65824     129980
Swap:       197564      16872     180692

I received an email about this: some software is written to encourage the swapping.