MoonChild Posted January 13, 2003 Report Share Posted January 13, 2003 So here is my question... My swap space (256MB) gets filled whenever I use wine, Abiword and OpenOffice. Unfortunately, it seems they never free it back, so I am stuck with no Swap until I restart X. I am unsure of why X keeps the Swap after the programs are shut, but it sucks because movie players use swap a lot, and I don't want to restart X to play movies. Any ideas on how to clear swap memory manually? Or how to tell X to release it anywayz? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted January 13, 2003 Report Share Posted January 13, 2003 How much ram do you have and how are you checking your memory usage? If you are not seeing pretty drastic performance drops when all your swap is being used, it may just be that your swap virtual memory is being cached somehow. Try checking in KDE Control Center>Information>Memory. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SoulSe Posted January 13, 2003 Report Share Posted January 13, 2003 I'm not sure exactly how to solve your problem, but you can clear your swap by simply deleting everything from /swap (seems too simple, I know). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MoonChild Posted January 13, 2003 Author Report Share Posted January 13, 2003 I am using Gkrellm KDE Memory Information says I have 8Kb free of RAM, while Gkrell shows something more reasonable, 200MBs Specs: 512 MB Ram 1 GB Swap Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted January 15, 2003 Report Share Posted January 15, 2003 With that much RAM, I'm surprised that you are going into swap very much at all. How is your performance, i.e. do applications take a long time to come up, is the system slow and unresponsive, etc ? The reason I ask is that if your RAM and swap are really maxed out, you will experience some real performance problems. If you are not having performance problems, you are probally misinterpreting the readings from your memory utility. For example, you say kde control center reports 8 Kb free. I'll bet if you look closely, you will see a large part of that RAM is reported as cached RAM. Although technically "used", cached RAM is available. It's used to increase performance by keeping the necessary info for an application in RAM which reduces the start up time of the app since it doesn't have to be read from the hard drive at a much slower rate. That's why the second time you start say a browser, it starts much faster than the first time. However, the operating system will clear out the cached ram as other apps need it. It's really nothing to be concerned about unless you are having performance problems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MoonChild Posted January 15, 2003 Author Report Share Posted January 15, 2003 As I said in my first post... The real problems start with movies and games. When the SWAP is filled, games are extremely slow to load and they loose their frame rate. Same with movies. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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