Re: using swap when there is free ram

[Pascal Hambourg <pascal@plouf.fr.eu.org>]

Le 01/03/2019 à 19:41, Reco a écrit :
> On Fri, Mar 01, 2019 at 07:34:50PM +0100, Pascal Hambourg wrote:
> > Le 01/03/2019 à 18:56, Reco a écrit :
> > > First, there's huge amount of unused (not to be confused with "free")
> > > memory on your host. And no, it's not a filesystem's cache (600M), it's
> > > really "nothing there"-unused memory which amounts 1880M.
> >
> > This is the amount reported in /proc/meminfo as MemFree - not MemUnused.
> > Can you please explain your definitions of "free" and "unused" memory ?
>
> Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt.gz
>
> What they call "free memory" usually is called MemAvailable in
> /proc/meminfo.

Who are "they", and where do you see their use of "free memory" with 
such meaning ? There is no occurrence of "free memory" in proc.txt.

MemAvailable is not free memory. As soon as memory is used for anything, 
it is not free any more. Whether it may be reclaimed easily is irrelevant.

> "MemFree", which was the sum of "LowFree" and "HighFree" back in the day
> (and still is for some architectures) - is the amount of memory which
> isn't used for anything, hence the "unused".

To me this is just the same as "free".