Re: Swap strangeness: total VIRT ~23mb for all processes [...]

[Chuck Ebbert <76306.1226@compuserve.com>]

On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 at 14:44:53 +0300 Denis Vlasenko wrote:
> Even if I add up size of every process, *counting libc shared pages
> once per process* (which will overestimate memory usage), I arrive at
> 23mb *total memory required by all processes*. How come kernel
> found 90mb to swap out? There is NOTHING to swap out except those
> 23mb!
>
> (Of course when oom_trigger was running, kernel first swapped out
> those 23mb and then started swapping out momery taken by oom_trigger
> itself, but when oom_trigger was killed, its RAM *and* swapspace
> should be deallocated. Thus I expected to see ~20 mb swap usage).


I am seeing this with Mozilla in an Xnest session.  Even after I terminate
Mozilla + Xnest there is a huge amount of swapped-out memory (~100MB).  This
is on a system with 320MB of memory.  Since the problem goes away when I
leave X I had assumed it was an X bug (Fedora Core 1, not up-to-date) but
now I wonder...  Kernel version is 2.6.9 + patches from L-K but problem is
the same in base 2.6.9.


--Chuck Ebbert  28-Oct-04  10:48:07