Swap - forcing Swap

[Jonathan S. Romero]

Extra ram will be used to cache hard disk accesses.  Your ram is not
actually fully utilized as this extra cache ram will be handed back to
programs on request.

Open "top" from a terminal and look for the entry marked "Cached" on the
top right.  This will tell you how much ram is being used for the disk
cache.

It freaked me out the first time too.

-Jonathan S. Romero

On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 22:53 +0200, René L. Reingard wrote:
> hello,
> today i see first time that the 'Systemmonitor' in a panel can be expanded  
> into different branches, like Processor, RAM, Network, ... Ubuntu is  
> allways new!
> now i also see that the RAM (Pentium 3 with 256MB RAM) is allready with  
> the simple desktop used to a high percentage (like 80%) and if greater  
> processes are going on, RAM usage goes up that 100% (Cache then around 40  
> to 60%).
> BUT the Swap Partition is not used at all (in the beginning) and goes to a  
> use of 25% after 15 minutes of heavy work (like Scanning the harddisk).
> 
> how the usage of the Swap can be forced - as the RAM is anyway allways  
> used by around 80%.
> 
> thank you for answering,
> regards,
> René
>