Did I break my Ubuntu System?

I’m afraid I jacked-up my swap space. Here is the output from a top:

top - 16:48:20 up 3:08, 3 users, load average: 0.24, 0.44, 0.69
Tasks: 131 total, 2 running, 129 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 9.6%us, 2.6%sy, 2.8%ni, 82.9%id, 1.8%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 1025920k total, 1005672k used, 20248k free, 27768k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 406416k cached

I was thinking that there should be some numbers in the Swap row. The reason I’m digging on this is my machine starts to run like dog-crap after I have it running for awhile and this wasn’t the case as recent as a month ago. Yeah, I had to deal with the memory leaks in Firefox, but that just needed a bounce of one app. Lately, I’ve been having to bounce my whole box, almost daily.

I just posted something to the Ubuntu Forums, but I thought I’d ask here, too. Yeah, I’m no linux sysadmin, so go easy on me and just provide feedback. Thanks…

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Josiah

    First, thanks for your comment on my blog. I had all the announcements turned off so I didn’t see it until just now. 🙂

    You can rebuild your swap with mkswap and then make sure it on w/ swapon.

    Don’t listen to the guy at the ubuntu forums about heavy memory usage. A linux system traditionally expands into the RAM available. It is normal. He also speaks of your system being at idle. That’s hard to support since your load averages are at 0.24, 0.44, and 0.69. I suppose I’d argue that any desktop machine isn’t at idle though. 🙂

    Here’s my top output for comparison:
    top – 08:40:16 up 40 min, 2 users, load average: 0.78, 0.52, 0.50
    Tasks: 116 total, 2 running, 114 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
    Cpu(s): 5.7%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 92.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
    Mem: 515136k total, 504308k used, 10828k free, 106376k buffers
    Swap: 1510068k total, 34748k used, 1475320k free, 106968k cached

  2. Erik Weibust

    Thanks Josiah…

    Come to find out that the problem is a bug with the Ubuntu upgrade process breaking my swap space. I’ll post more details shortly.

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