Re: Why is this system swapping?

On Apr 27, 2005, at 1:48 PM, Anjan Dave wrote:

> As you can see the system starts utilizing swap at some point, with so
> many processes. Some time ago we had decided to keep the connections
> from the pool open for longer

You've shown the system has used swap but not that it is swapping.
Having swap in use is fine - there is likely plenty of code and whatnot
that is not being used so it dumped it out to swap. However if you are
actively moving data to/from swap that is bad. Very bad. Especially on
linux.

To tell if you are swapping you need to watch the output of say, vmstat
1 and look at the si and so columns.

Linux is very swap happy and likes to swap things for fun and profit.

--
Jeff Trout <jeff@jefftrout.com>
http://www.jefftrout.com/
http://www.stuarthamm.net/