swapspace

[Colin Law]

On 19 October 2014 00:06, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
> On Saturday 18 October 2014 12:26:04 Colin Law did opine
> And Gene did reply:
>> On 18 October 2014 16:54, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:
>> > ...
>> > OTOH, okular took me down yesterday, while trying to read thru a 42
>> > megabyte, 650 page pdf, the USB2.0 stds document.  No clue if it was
>> > into swap at the time & no way to acess an htop as it was bash &
>> > everything it started that all died in one swell foop.
>>
>> You can usually tell if swap is being used intensively, causing the
>> machine to clog up, as the disc will be thrashing away continuously.
>>
>> Colin
>
> That did not appear to be happening.  gkrellm is watching that, and the
> cpu display was not particularly busy.

If swapping and disc thrashing are clogging the system up then the cpu
will not be busy, it is held up waiting for the disc all the time.

Colin