On Wednesday 28 Nov 2007, Peter Salisbury wrote:
> On Wednesday 28 Nov 2007, Samuel Penn wrote:
> > On Wednesday 28 November 2007 18:00:55 Peter Salisbury wrote:
> > > How do I find out what's in my swap file / memory?
> > >
> > > I have a few apps running (KDE, konqueror, kontact, openoffice,
> > > gimp, firefox). I have 543MB free memory (out of 1GB) but there
> > > is 428MB in the swap file. (gkrellm reports)
> >
> > Possibly something unused got swapped out to make room for
> > buffers?
> >
> > top should show you what is using swap - 'f' to select fields if
> > SWAP isn't shown, then 'P' to select SWAP. Space returns to the
> > top display. You can sort by SWAP usage, using 'O'.
> >
> > Not sure how useful or accurate it is though, since mine is
> > showing results that don't immediately make sense (it's probably
> > counting shared memory lots of times).
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Be seeing you, http://www.glendale.org.uk
> > Sam. Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@???
>
> Thanks Sam,
>
> Not sure what the 'swapped size' in top means though. By doing
> swapoff -a; swapon -a I forced it to load all the swapped stuff
> into memory. I now have 0 swap according to gkrellm but every
> process is showing a non-zero swap size in top, up to 200MB for
> soffice.bin. Clearly gkrellm and top are measuring different
> things!
>
> Peter
Follow up: top shows a column called Virtual Size which for firefox
gradually drifts up as I open and close tabs. When I shut down
firefox (first time for a few days) it released nearly 200MB of
memory. The other app that released a large amount of memory was
gimp, again after a few days use. It didn't have anything open but I
wonder if it had stuff on the clipboard or something?
Perhaps I should just do a pre-hibernate command to close firefox and
a post-hibernate one to bring it back again. The 'tabmix plus'
extension brings back all the tabs anyway.
Peter
