how to free swap memory without rebooting

[Karthik_6]

Hi,

When I am running particular utility in hp c3000, the swap memory become full, currently rebooting the machine to free the filled swap, Is there any command or utility to free the swap without rebooting the machine.

thanks in advance
Karthik

[Patrick Wallek]

The only way to free swap space is to exit out of whatever application is using all the space.

How much memory do you have in the machine? It sounds as if you REALLY REALLY need a LOT more memory.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If you are talking about device-swap then your question has little meaning. As soon as you kill the processes, you should free the used swap. If using filesystem swap, once allocated only a reboot will shrink the filesize.

This problem can be exacerbated by the use of kill -9 which might leave shared memory segments that are not in use by any process but still occupy virtual address space.

[Vincente Fernandes]

Either reboot the server or exit out of application which uses the swap space. If you have space try increase the swap space. Swap space should be minimum atleast the size of ram or 1 1/2 times of the size of ram.