>I am noticing that when I use 'free", lots of my 256Mg memory is being >used without swap hardly being touched. Is this normal? Yes that is normal as Linux will use all of your RAM before swapping out to disk. You should use tmpfs as glibc 2.3 and later require it to manage POSIX shared memory. I have tmpfs here and I don't notice that I have this problem. My swap almost never gets used. In fact I would say that it doesn't get used at all because everytime I check it says it's got half a gig of free swap. I have 512 MB of RAM in this box so that probably makes a difference too but I think the problem is that you should use tmpfs and you are not.
