I'm new on Kubuntu, and after some week of installation I noticed that my system fill completely ram memory and doesn't use the swap memory at all (or for maximum 1-2 Mb...) I have 725 Mb of ram and 2Gb of swap... Since I was used on gentoo to have a lot of programs running at the same time my ram is quite always full (and as result the system get very slow). Can anybody tell me what's wrong?
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Re: Swap usage
In short, nothing is wrong, that is how a healthy linux system should behave...'use' up available physical ram, and don't use swap unless absolutely necessary.
The difference is that not all of the physical ram 'used' is reserved by applications, linux tries to use the rest of the ram for disk caches and buffers, to speed up the system...in other words, it tries to put that valuable Ram to good use, so it doesn't just 'sit still'.
If more memory is needed for applications...the caches and buffers are dynamically reduced to free RAM for applications.
SWAP on the other hand is sort of 'emergency' ram...only used when you have so many applications running that they can't fit to the RAM even if all of it is reserved for applications. (Because SWAP is much slower than physical RAM)
You can find more on the linux memory management on these threads for example:
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=7572.0
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=6155.0
http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=7265.0
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