Swap Space Not Being Used?

[Charles Curley]

On Thu, Sep 21, 2006 at 05:33:40PM -0400, RICHARD wrote:
> I'm using FC4 on a Dell Inspiron 2200 (for over 1 year). OOo has started
> crashing when working with inserting large picture files (although I've
> worked with them in the past without problem). I noticed in xosview that
> the physical memory (0.5GB) quickly goes up near the maximum and then OOo
> exits. I also noticed that the swap space (which I believe is about 1GB)
> always shows exactly zero. (On a 2gb memory dual opteron system, xosview
> reports 845mb.) Shouldn't xosview show some swap space being used?

I don't know about xosview, as I don't use it. But free might or might
not show any swap in use during normal usage. e.g:

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1519       1484         35          0        193        852
-/+ buffers/cache:        437       1081
Swap:         4094          1       4093

shows four GB of swap mounted and one megabyte of swap in use.

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           234        230          4          0         26         60
-/+ buffers/cache:        143         91
Swap:            0          0          0

shows swap off.

> 
> Here is the partition table reported by fdisk:
> 

>    Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System

> /dev/hda6            2570        2697     1028128+  82  Linux swap /
> Solaris

> Any ideas on how I can check on whether swap is being used and/or turn
> sway back on if it is actually not being used?

First, to ensure that swap is turned on at boot, be sure it is in
/etc/fstab. e.g I have:

LABEL=SWAP-hda6  swap       swap    defaults        0 0

or maybe, if you aren't a fan of disk labels:

/dev/hda6        swap       swap    defaults        0 0

Then simply run:

swapon /dev/hda6

to get it running. No response, in Unix tradition, indicates
success. If swap is already enabled on that partition, you'll see:

# swapon /dev/hda6
swapon: /dev/hda3: Device or resource busy

-- 

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