Re: using swap when there is free ram
Bruno Schneider wrote:
> My system started using swap space even when there is available RAM:
>
> $ free -m
> total used free shared buff/cache available
> Mem: 3882 1004 2303 63 573 2598
> Swap: 956 239 717
>
> Can anyone help find the reason / prevent it?
This is normal and expected.
The kernel has decided that it has about 239MB of libraries or
other pages that it will not be using anytime soon, and since
you have swap available, it swapped it out.
This will improve your overall performance.
The absolute quantity of swap space used is not particularly
important; what's important for performance is how much swapping
activity is going on.
The vmstat command will show you pages swapped in (si) and out
(so). You should expect that to be 0 or very low at any given
time.
If you give it two numbers:
vmstat 1 5
It will run 5 times, pausing 1 second in between each run.
-dsr-
Reply to: