Swap Space Problem?

Over the last couple of days my laptop has been stalling terribly on bootup and when starting up applications (even a terminal takes ages to come up) Whilst trying to figure out whats happened I noticed that nothing is being swapped out. Output from top command shows that I have approx 500mb allocated to swap but none of it is being used...dont think this was the case before!

I have used swapon command to try and 'restart' it and there is a corresponding line in /etc/fstab but nothing seems to be happening. I am running redhat 7.3 and have 256mb ram..I am not entirely sure this is the culprit of my woes but something should be getting swapped out right?...anyone seen anything like this before?

as always any pointers appreciated.

Sorry I can't answer your question but I'm curious about the above quote. What do you mean? Are you putting something in your fstab to clear your swap partition?

...sorry I just meant there was a line in /etc/fstab which is supposed to load the swap partition on boot. eg

/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

when I issue 'cat /proc/swaps' i get

$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hda6 partition 589640 0 -1

i would have expected the 'Used' filed to show something but it doesnt!.

...thanks anyway