Alexander Puchmayr posted on Thu, 09 May 2013 11:34:20 +0200 as excerpted:
> Duncan,
>
> a machine having 4GB RAM and only running desktop + kontact +some
> dolphin/konqueror instances and nothing more shall IMHO not use any swap
> at all. Mine has right now more than 4.1 GB swap used, and the biggest
> memory- eater is virtuoso-t with more than 2.3GB RES. It is keeping the
> SSD busy.
Well, depending on how much you're reading from disk, what you have
swappiness set to (/proc/sys/vm/swappiness, controls the kernel's dump-
cache vs. swap apps preference when memory gets tight, kernel default is
60, but some people prefer setting it to 20 or so, while I've had it set
to 100 for quite some time, etc, but under ordinary conditions you're
right at least to the extent that if there /is/ swap, it shouldn't be
much more than a few hundred MB at most, and there shouldn't be
4+ gigs swap used, for sure.
As I said my normal working set app memory seldom runs above a gig, tho
if I'm doing a huge parallel make job it certainly can.
Meanwhile, if virtuoso has done any serious indexing, that means it read
those files into cache, which at a suitable swappiness the kernel won't
want to get rid of and will swap apps out instead. But even if it's
swapping most apps out, as I said, that shouldn't really be that much
more than a gig unless you're doing something heavy duty, and swapping
out cache doesn't work since it'd have to be read back in either way, so
the kernel doesn't do that... so where's that 4 GB going?
> IMHO there is something with with virtuoso-t.
I'd say some sort of memory leak. Does it seem to increase, albeit
slowly, without end?
> Of course, I coud turn it off entirely by recompiling KDE with
> USE=-semantic-destop or by disabling the indexing service, but thats
> not the point.
Well, it /shouldn't/ /have/ to be the point, anyway. But if it were
working well for them, a lot of the people turning it off wouldn't be, so
the point or not, it's what a lot of folks are ending up doing to cope
with it.
> BTW: My first linux box had 8MB RAM on a 486, around '95
It wasn't Linux until some years later, but my first real machine of my
own was a 486sx25, 4MB RAM, 130 MB hard drive. I remember when RAM first
went over what that first hard drive had, and of course, now high end
rigs are within an order of magnitude of that in gigs of RAM, as opposed
to megs of disk, back then. Friends of mine had a Commodore-64 and a
TRS-80, before that, and I worked on an old Compaq minicomp of some sort
in high school in the 80s, but none of those were /mine/.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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