If info is swapped out to disc and later read back into memory, it will often be left allocated in the swap area until swap space runs low.
That means that if the same info needs to be swapped out again later and hasn't changed, the OS can just drop the pages from allocated RAM without needing to write anything to disc saving time.
Swap allocated to stuff that has been read back into memory will be freed either
- when the relevant pages are no longer needed at all (i.e. are freed by the application)
- when the relevant pages are changed (so the copy on disc is no longer up to date)
- the machine runs low on swap space so clears some things that are already in RAM to make room
Look in /proc/meminfo for a line called "SwapCached". This entry counts pages that are found both in RAM and in swap partitions. For instance, picking a small VM at random, the /proc/meminfo virtual file one of my VMs shows:
SwapTotal: 698816 kB
SwapFree: 624520 kB
SwapCached: 17232 kB
indicating that 74268K of swap space is allocated, but that 17232K worth of those pages are also currently mapped into RAM too (so could be deallocated from swap at a moment's notice if the space is needed by something else).
Also there will no doubt be pages sat there that was swapped out ages ago and have never been used again since. The kernel will not reload pages from swap just because there is some free RAM to read it back into as that free RAM might be better used for cache or buffers - pages written to swap are generally only reread when they are next needed.
If you want to clear out what is in swap, as long as you have enough free and/or freeable (i.e. free+cache+buffers (less those parts of the c+b counts that are not freeable RightThisInstant)), just turn it off and back on again with swapoff -a && swapon -a.
Of course you could also have a memory leak somewhere too, but that is not the only explanation for the behaviour you are seeing.
The cache memory in Linux-based machines is often used to cache disk blocks into memory to prevent writing to the harddisk and speed up I/O operations. Also, a lot of free memory is cached and released when it is actually required.
When interpreting the output of free, you should look at the second row for the actual memory usage.
The above numbers can be interpreted as:
- 9534176 kilobytes cached memory
- 737752 actually used memory
- 15701956 actually free memory
For more information, take a look at http://www.faqs.org/docs/linux_admin/buffer-cache.html.
Best Answer
This error can occur when ulimits are set. What's the output of
ulimit -a?