Memory is free, but still swapping?

Posted by japancheese on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by japancheese
Published on 2010-04-19T19:12:56Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 19:23 UTC
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memory

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ubuntu

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swap

Hello, I'm sure this is a pretty basic question, but I'm just trying to get a grasp of what's going on with my Ubuntu (Hardy Herron) server (running a Rails-based site). It seems that I have free memory available, yet the system is reporting that it is still swapping memory (unless I'm reading this incorrectly?).

Here is the "free -m" output

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1024        905        118          0         33        409
-/+ buffers/cache:        462        561
Swap:         2047         95       1952

Could anyone explain to me some possible reasons that it is maintaining 95mb of swap at all times (it is never less)? I'm just looking for some leads on things I could check out that would explain to me exactly how memory is utilized in Linux.

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