ram and swap memory question

[Gregory Nowak]

Hi All.

Below is a portion of output from top(1), which will explain my following question.


70 processes: 68 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 20.0% user, 80.0% system,  0.0% nice,  0.0% idle
Mem:   256268K av,  196460K used,   59808K free,       0K shrd,    9112K buff
Swap:  377436K av,    8452K used,  368984K free                   80376K cached
 

If I have 59 megs of ram free, then could someone please explain why 8 megs of swap are being used? I thought the system didn't start using swap until it ran out of ram.

Thanks in advance.

Greg