memory /swap question: possibly also tmpfs question

[David Csercsics]

>I am noticing that when I use 'free", lots of my 256Mg memory is being
>used without swap hardly being touched. Is this normal?
Yes that is normal as Linux will use all of your RAM before swapping
out to disk. You should use tmpfs as glibc 2.3 and later require  it
to manage POSIX shared memory. I have tmpfs here and I don't notice
that I have this problem. My swap almost never gets used. In fact I
would say that it doesn't get used at all because everytime I check it
says it's got half a gig of free swap. I have 512 MB of RAM in this
box so that probably makes a difference too but I think the problem
is that you should use tmpfs and you are not.