Why would my server be swapping...

[Wouter van Vliet]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 14:13:19 +0100, Douglas Furlong
<douglas.furlong at firebox.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 15:03 +0200, Wouter van Vliet wrote:
> > On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 08:52:24 -0400 (EDT), ne... <akabi at speakeasy.net> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > On Oct 14, 2004 at 14:38, Wouter van Vliet in a soothing rage wrote:
> > >
> > > >G'day my fellow Fedorians,
> > > >
> > > >Crappy intro, huh? Anyway, I've got a question - bit of an oddity I
> > > >noticed in the output to the "free" command. I'll post that output
> > > >before I continue:
> > > >
> > > >             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> > > >Mem:        515536     196040     319496          0      22448     120144
> > > >-/+ buffers/cache:      53448     462088
> > > >Swap:      1052248     151476     900772
> > > >
> > > >Hope the mail brings it over nice and columny. Anyway, what it shows
> > > >is 311 megabytes of free memory and 147MB used swap space. Isn't that
> > > >a bit odd, and shouldn't the server only be swapping when all (or at
> > > >least most) of the RAM is in use?
> > > You left out the kernel version you use. Swap usage varies between
> > > kernel versions.
> > >
> > > Mem:    515828k total,   354288k used,   161540k free,   115340k buffers
> > > Swap:  1048568k total,      132k used,  1048436k free,    92048k cached
> > >
> > > This is from my FC3t2 box.
> > >
> > > N.Emile...
> > > --
> >
> > I'm using FC2, don't actually know :$:$ what kernel is currently
> > active, or how to find out. These are the installed kernels (according
> > to rpm -q kernel).
> >
> > kernel-2.6.5-1.358
> > kernel-2.6.6-1.435.2.3
> > kernel-2.6.8-1.521
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Wouter
> > 
> The easiest way is with the uname command.
> 
> uname -a will give you the lot.
> 

uname -a gives:

Linux ********* 2.6.6-1.435.2.3smp #1 SMP Thu Jul 1 08:36:21 EDT 2004
i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Now, what does that tell you about my swapping concerns?

(replaced my hostname with stars, just a security precaution)