Nothing is being swapped out

ikbendeman

ikbendeman

I am running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE on my laptop and nothing gets swapped out. Even when ram is completely full and it causes my computer to go painfully slow... any ideas why?

uname -a
Code: 
FreeBSD  8.0-RELEASE 
FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Sat Nov 21 15:48:17 UTC 2009
root@<wronghostname>:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

dmesg (though 'dmesg|grep swap' shows nothing)
http://pastebin.com/f3c0449a2
 
You have 4 GB of RAM, and you want it to start swapping? What are you doing that you think it needs more than 4 GB of RAM?

Check the output of [cmd=""]top[/cmd] to see where your RAM is being used. Unless your free memory hits 0, and your cache hits 0, you aren't running out of RAM.

Also, check the output of top to see where your CPU usage is going. Most likely, it's that that's slowing things down, and not a "lack" of RAM.

You really don't want to be swapping ... that thrashes the harddrive, which is the slowest component of a laptop.

FreeBSD tries to keep as much as possible in RAM, without swapping things to disk (unlike Linux, which tries to keep as little as possible in RAM, and is constantly swapping stuff out to disk).
 
ikbendeman said:
I am running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE on my laptop and nothing gets swapped out. Even when ram is completely full and it causes my computer to go painfully slow... any ideas why?
Click to expand...
What do you mean by "completely full"? Low value in output of top?
It is absolutely normal. OS eat it all and then disposes it.
I believe it is slow by other reason. Check out systat -v.
 
I will do that when I get back to my laptop, I'll let you know, thanks. The only thing i was wondering was in linux you could set swappability to 0 to act more like freebsd (from what I've gathered from your posts), but I would set it to 10 or 20 and it seemed to perform better for my uses (as a simple desktop system)
 
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