Question about the swap file...???

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Tue, 2010-06-22 at 07:46 -0500, Larry wrote:
> *I've been watching my pc's CPU at times in is lower than at other time, 
> I am guessing when it is performing  a task, it inscreases say from 16.5 
> too 48, then drops back to a lower rate...But the Swap file shows  0%, 
> all of the time, would this speed up things if the swap file would take 
> the load away from the CPU at times...???
> 
> If this is true, can someone suggest to me on how to get the swap to be 
> used when it is needed...???
> 

0% of swap used is generally a "good thing".  It means there is zero
paging to and from disk which likely means your workload is not taxing
the virtual memory system at all.  Using swap does not reduce the load
on the CPU.  If anything paging to and from swap will increase your CPU
load, since it takes some cpu time to run the paging algorithm.

-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005