[CoLoCo] I'm confused about how the disk works

[Kenneth D. Weinert]

Since upgrading to Gutsy, I've had an issue with my laptop occasionally
just getting insanely busy - load goes up to over 20 and the disk access
light turns into a green laser.

When running  top  I see that Xorg is using almost 50% of the memory,
but 80+% of the CPU is waiting.

Here's where the problem comes in - in top I see that I have no swap,
but looking at fdisk shows a swap partition and if I type
swapon /dev/sda5 then suddenly I have a bunch of swap available.

In fstab both /dev/sda1 and /dev/sda5 are commented out.

So, my theory is that somehow I'm using all my memory (top shows about
10K available) and the reason things are so busy is because the kernel
is paging and paging and paging and paging and ...

Can someone point me to some docs on how the disk stuff works on Ubuntu
and how I can automatically start swap when the box starts up?

Thanks.

-- 
Ken Weinert
http://quarter-flash.com

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