Oracle on Solaris Memory question

Hi all,

I have 1gb physical memory and over 2gb swap space on my Solaris box (Solaris 8).
My SGA is about 300mb. When I startup my instance (8.1.7) the amount of free
memory (physical ram) dropped as expected but the swap usage also increased by 300mb. I am little puzzled over this as I don't expect the swap
used to increase since my physical memory can accommodate the SGA.

Below is a snapshot of TOP showing the memory:

Database up

last pid: 23317; load averages: 0.25, 0.09, 0.09 23:14:25
74 processes: 73 sleeping, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 97.6% idle, 1.4% user, 0.5% kernel, 0.5% iowait, 0.0% swap Memory: 1024M real, 341M free, 490M swap in use, 2319M swap free

Bring down the database, and see the free memory goes up and swap used decreases.

last pid: 23317; load averages: 0.31, 0.12, 0.10 23:14:56
52 processes: 50 sleeping, 1 running, 1 on cpu CPU states: 84.1% idle, 4.9% user, 7.2% kernel, 3.8% iowait, 0.0% swap Memory: 1024M real, 728M free, 87M swap in use, 2722M swap free

Startup the DB again, and see the free memory descreases and swap used increases.

last pid: 23339; load averages: 0.34, 0.14, 0.11 23:15:26
58 processes: 55 sleeping, 2 running, 1 on cpu CPU states: 62.1% idle, 10.9% user, 17.9% kernel, 9.2% iowait, 0.0% swap Memory: 1024M real, 353M free, 466M swap in use, 2344M swap free

So with over 300MB of physical ram still being free, why is the swap in use so high?

Thanks.

Richard

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