Kevin Schroeder wrote:
> I may be asking the question the wrong way, but when I start up
> PostgreSQL swap is what gets used the most of. I've got 1282MB free
> RAM right now and and 515MB swap in use. Granted, swap file usage
> probably wouldn't be zero, but I would guess that it should be a lot
> lower so something must be keeping PostgreSQL from using the free RAM
> that my system is reporting. For example, one of my postgres
> processes is 201M in size but on 72M is resident in RAM. That extra
> 130M is available in RAM, according to top, but postgres isn't using it.
The test you're doing doesn't measure what you think you're measuring.
First, what else is running on the machine? Note that some shared
memory allocations do reserve backing pages in swap, even though the
pages aren't currently in use. Perhaps this is what you're measuring?
"swap -s" has better numbers than top.
You'd be better by trying a reboot then starting pgsql and seeing what
memory is used.
Just because you start a process and see the swap number increase
doesn't mean that the new process is in swap. It means some anonymous
pages had to be evicted to swap to make room for the new process or some
pages had to be reserved in swap for future use. Typically a new
process won't be paged out unless something else is causing enormous
memory pressure...
-- Alan