Re: swapping?

you can use vmstat to measure swap activity. check the man page for your
system.

Robert Treat

On Thu, 2002-11-14 at 10:53, Wei Weng wrote:
> How do you notice that if a system started swapping or not?
>
> Thanks
>
> On Thu, 2002-11-14 at 09:37, Shridhar Daithankar wrote:
> > On 14 Nov 2002 at 10:30, Wei Weng wrote:
> >
> > > The term had been mentioned often enough on this mailing list. Can
> > > someone enlighten me with some description or a URL where I can read on?
> > > And why is it important to postgresql database performace?
> >
> > When programs request more memory than available, OS 'swaps' some memory to
> > special area on disk and make the memory available. To programs, it gives
> > appearance that nearly infinite memory is available.
> >
> > Unfortunately disk are hell slower than RAM and hence swapping slows things
> > down as it takes much to swap in to disk and swap out of disk. Since OS does
> > not care which programs get swapped, it is possible that postgresql instance
> > can get swapped. That slows down effective memory access to knees..
> >
> > That's why for good performance, a serve should never swap..
> >
> > Bye
> > Shridhar
> >
> > --
> > Peterson's Admonition: When you think you're going down for the third time --
> > just remember that you may have counted wrong.
> >
> >
> > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> > TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command
> > (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to majordomo(at)postgresql(dot)org)
> --
> Wei Weng
> Network Software Engineer
> KenCast Inc.
>
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to majordomo(at)postgresql(dot)org