WTF!?

[samwichse]

I just checked my memory usage and it shows:

Used memory 85MB
Used Swap 107MB

I've got 768MB of ram, why on earth does it feel the need to add all that to swap!?! Even if I had just 256, a swap would be unecessary.

EDIT: just went to 76 and 107?

[jkrohn]

Unsure, but did some looking around. Stumbled on this.

Linux uses swap space as "extra" memory for pages of application
memory that are not being actively used by the application but have
been modified (written to).

From a larger article here: http://www.xenotime.net/linux/swap-mini-howto.txt

Jkrohn

[GohanSSJ]

Not sure why that is, but you need to disable it that it uses swap.

[nukes]

It depends, if you have used your memory up at some point and had to use swap, it doesn't always move stuff back.

[nukes]

I am trying to get some games running in Linux. I thought it was stupid that the windows version of Q3 runs better than the Linux one under linux. I grabbed a patch and installed it, copied the pk3 files from another machine and got it all set up.
The sound doesn't work. I get this message in the console:

------- sound initialization -------
/dev/dsp: Device or resource busy
Could not open /dev/dsp
------------------------------------

I have no sound servers or anthing that would eat the dsp. I have chmod a+rwx /dev/dsp but as I expected it had no effect as I am in the audio group. It does this for root as well.
Any ideas?

[Scott Tiger]

Was this supposed to be a new thread Nukes?

Can you play sound with XMMS as yourself? That would rule out permissions. My guess is that there' something wrong with your Quake3 .config file. It should be in /home/nukes/.q3a if memory serves correctly. I just installed RH9 onto my box last night so when I get home I'll install Q3 and then send you my Q3 config file to compare with if you like.

[samwichse]

jkrohn

That article was pretty good... the only explanation I can come up with is this section:

Swap space is used by the "tmpfs" filesystem as overflow storage
whenever cache memory usage needs to be reduced.

Since it always runs pretty much full on cache memory, maybe whenever it dumps that cache it dumps it to the swap? Cause I've not had anything particularly huge open since the last win98 gaming session.

I wonder, would it be a bad idea to just completely disable the swap partition?

Sam