2.4.5: swap/VM strangeness

A PIII with 96MB ram became extremely sluggish inside X11. I managed to terminate the X server, bringing the system in a useful state again. While the system was completely quiet (no X server) I noticed that a lot of both memory and swap was being used for no appearent reason:

# free 
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         93692      85164       8528          0       1404      75252
-/+ buffers/cache:       8508      85184
Swap:       133048      54944      78104

# swapoff -a
	(took a minute)

# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         93692      41760      51932          0       1420      24828
-/+ buffers/cache:      15512      78180
Swap:            0          0          0

# swapon -a
# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         93692      41852      51840          0       1420      24848
-/+ buffers/cache:      15584      78108
Swap:       133048          0     133048

It looks as if the swap partition is being cached in main memory.

Frank