Re: Huge Swap area being used despite having available ram (Solaris 8 , ora9.2.)

On 30 Mar 2005 08:40:57 -0800, "GeoPappas" <PappasG_at_gmail.com> wrote:

>I would tend to agree with Mr. Rowland. I could be wrong, but my
>understanding is that virtual memory (aka SWAP) is used ONLY after
>physical memory (aka RAM) is used up. So I too would be concerned that
>SWAP is being used before RAM is totally used up.

No, virtual memory is not ONLY used after physical memory is used up. Pages are being faulted to disk based upon the Least Recently Used algorithm most O/Ses implemented. The LRU algorithm is a result of the Working Set mechanism, observed in the 60's of the previous century. No program will ever use *all* the memory allocated to it, consequently unused memory regions can be faulted to disk.

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Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA