RE: [cobalt-users] high CPU load (idle CPU) ???

[flash22@xxxxxxx]

On Tue, 25 Sep 2001, Adam Knowles wrote:
> After reading this msg I ran 'top' on my Raq4i. The Mem overview shows:
> 
> Mem:   127860K av,  123460K used,    4400K free,   61752K shrd,    
2668K buff
> Swap:  131532K av,   25392K used,  106140K free                   16820K
> cached

Maybe, you have only 25 meg swapped out, which is about the amount of
stuff that sits around goofing off, and you have 4 meg free, plus 2 meg in
disk buffers, so you aren't at the point where the machine will start to
suffer, but, you are fairly close to it. I'd be thinking of a memory
upgrade as a 'do when convenient' option. (It will help disk performance
more than anything at the point you are at,by allowing more disk buffers)

ps: you might want to take a look over a period of time, the 'free' memory
jumps too much to really make conclusions for a chunk as small as 4 meg, a
program like sendmail can use/free that much memory instantly...

The other side of the coin is, the machine will work, albiet slowly, with
up to 100% of the memory swapped out (eg memory usage > 2*physical
ram) but beyond that you start to get into real trouble :)

If you run dns on your machine there is another thing, you must never ever
let named swap to disk,it stops replying to queries when it does that
because it can't respond to udp packets fast enough to prevent them from
getting overwritten by subsequent requests...common source of mystery
random dns behaviour....

gsh