swapspace problem

hi all,

i am facing a problem that even memory utilization is 99% the swapspace utilization is 0%...
idont know why it happens.
i am trying to give swapon <swap device file name>
but the reply is device in use......

can any one help me out.....
please tell me clearly as i am new to linux.

How are you determining that?

Have you tried "top"?

i have monitered through "free" command

Is this actually a problem?

Have you got programs that are failing due to lack of memory?

sorry i cant get you...

Unless programs are failing to run or failing to allocate sufficient memory to do their tasks then having 0% of swap space used is not a problem.

What do you do if it is a problem? I have a server running RHEL 3 update 5 in an Oracle RAC with two other identical servers. They all have 4GB of RAM and 2GB partitions for swap. The three servers are at high mem usage and usually into swap between 100MB - 600MB. One of the three has swap available but is not using it and we had to restart some Oracle services because they couldn't allocate memory. It was recently rebooted to try and solve the swap problem but as far as I can tell it's still not using swap.

[root@proteus ~]# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3766       3666        100          0        205       2948
-/+ buffers/cache:        512       3254
Swap:         2047          0       2047
[root@proteus ~]# cat /proc/swaps 
Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda3                       partition       2096472 0       -2

I've tried recreating the swap partition by doing a swapoff/mkswap/swapon on /dev/sda3. I've also tried creating a file based swap and adding that with no avail.

Any ideas?