[Tfug] I'm using ~2GB of swap space that doesn't exist.

[bpoag at comcast.net]

This is why I love Linux, and want to shoot myself in the face with a 19th century trumpeted muzzle loader: 


top - 09:46:10 up 3 min, 6 users, load average: 3.43, 1.84, 0.71 
Tasks: 217 total, 1 running, 216 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie 
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 1.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.9%id, 0.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st 
Mem: 12469436k total, 5118140k used, 7351296k free, 18584k buffers 
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 4752240k cached 

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 
3998 root 20 0 1939m 1.4g 1.4g S 10.0 11.9 1:31.98 vmware-vmx 


I have no swap space, yet, vmware-vmx is using 1939MB of it. 

Someone care to enlighten me as to the nature of this delightful gem? The manpage for top makes no mention of how the "cached" field is different from "buffers". I'm assuming this means computational pages versus filesystem pages, respectively. 

But then, why is it listed as part of the "Swap:" line, since it's obviously going to be resident in physical? 


Cheers, 
Bowie 

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