[conspire] How much memory each process is taking up

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 03:55:38PM -0800:

> Likewise, the fact that the swap partition is actually in use (if
> barely) does not indicate, in any way, system stress.  Some swap use
> always happens if you provide swap to the kernel.  This happens to be an
> edge case of a workstation with generous RAM that's running fairly
> lightweight processes, hence is barely touching swap.  There are
> effective ways to measure the "swappiness" of a system, e.g., using the
> iostat utility, but "free" isn't really useful for that.

vmstat is useful too -- if you're using a lot of swap,
but the "si" and "so" columns in the vmstat results
are zero, that just means that you have some idle
stuff swapped out.

-- 
Don Marti                                        +1 510-814-0932
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/                          +1 510-332-1587 mobile
dmarti at zgp.org
See you at OpenSource World: August 11-13, 2009 in San Francisco