RAM and swap questions

[Nathan P.]

I run a moh:aa linux server - Red Hat 9.0 ; AMD 2400+ ; 1 Gig DDR RAM ; 80
Gig ATA HD - Linux Kernel: 2.4.20-31.9 (I didn't compile this kernel).  I
had recently switched hosts and it's been running on this new host for about
a week.  I had 512mb of RAM and it wasn't using any swap space and I had
about 100mb of free RAM.

Just yesterday I got an upgrade to 1 gig of RAM - because I'm going to run a
second moh:aa server.  Then what the heck!  It's using 30 mb of swap.  I
know that the way Linux and Windows handle "swap" are completely different
and that Linux uses swap on purpose and caches stuff so that it's faster to
load stuff blah blah.  But what I've heard many times and I'm not sure if
it's right - but I've heard that you don't want a game server using swap.
Is that right?  Actually that seems logical to me because RAM is a heck of a
lot faster than a hard drive.  It just seems funky that I go from no swap
usage with 512mb of RAM to 30mb of swap with 1 gig of RAM.

I'm trying to get them to check it out but they're really busy.

Neways......any insight to this issue would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks,
  NateDog