swapspace

[Tom H]

On Sat, Oct 18, 2014 at 4:28 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 18 October 2014 06:51, Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 11:46 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:


>>> I have installed swapspace [1] on 12.04 from the ubuntu repo, which
>>> should give me a dynamic swapfile.  If I do
>>> sudo service swapspace status
>>> it tells me it is running, and if I tell it to restart it does so
>>> without error.  However System Monitor says that swap is not available
>>> and in top is shows 0 free.  Does anyone know whether that is that as
>>> it should be or is swapspace not working?
>>
>> [What's System Monitor?]
>
> https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/quantal/gnome-system-monitor/
> It comes already installed with Ubuntu (I think).

Oh. Thanks. I should've checked but I wasn't thinking in terms of a GUI app...


>> Maybe your system isn't swapping?
>>
>> What's the output of "free -h"?
>
> -h does not seem to be a valid option for free, but without that option

You must be running an older release. It exists on 14.04 and this is
the output from my Lenovo running 14.10:

# free -h
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7.7G       5.8G       1.9G       517M       225M       2.4G
-/+ buffers/cache:       3.2G       4.5G
Swap:         7.9G       418M       7.5G


>                total           used          free       shared
> buffers     cached
> Mem:       2052124    1718992     333132          0     226468     780216
> -/+ buffers/cache:     712308    1339816
> Swap:            0          0          0
>
> No it is not swapping, but I had expected it to show that there is
> swap space available.  Perhaps it is fine and swap space will be made
> available if it is needed, I don't know.  Is there a simple way of
> using up lots of ram so to force it to swap?

I wouldn't expect it to use a swap file if it isn't needed.

Opening many tabs in many browsers'll eat up RAM quickly.