This is an old desktop I use for some small self hosting services. I never use all my RAM and I don’t see any RAM spikes other than when I install/compile things which I haven’t done in months. I restarted the machine a couple of times, but the SWAP will eventually go right back up to 100%.
I have an Ubuntu server/yunohost setup and found: https://askubuntu.com/questions/157793/why-is-swap-being-used-even-though-i-have-plenty-of-free-ram
My cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness value is indeed 60. Im not sure what would reduce the SWAP space usage.
Would changing this swappiness value help? Anyone come across this issue before?
EDIT: Found out what it is, its the matrix server that is running on the system. Its taking up a significant amount of swap. Found out via:
smem -s swap -r -p
turning that off, the system is now using 90% less SWAP.
/opt/yunohost/matrix-synaps was the process.
1gb swap is way too small…
I usually setup swap to be 2x the total ram size. So, 32gb swap in your case.
Nothing wrong here, seems normal. With such little swap.
Actually Linux kernel works better with swap, the more the better. It will lalso perform better than zero swap. Counterintuitive indeed, but that’s how it works.
If you don’t want swap, use zram.
+1 for
zramswap, especially if you’re tight on RAM but have a few CPU cycles to spare.32GB of swap is huge, I wouldn’t bother with that much unless you’re suspending to disk regularly. I personally just suspend to RAM and call it a day.
On my laptop with 24GB RAM, I have about 20GB swap, which matches the system memory (rest is dedicated to my APU). On my desktop with 16GB RAM, I have 16GB swap, because that’s what my OS picked (I would otherwise go with 10GB). On both systems, I usually only have 2-3GB in swap anyway.
On my server, I have no swap at all and 16GB RAM (usually use <5GB at any time). I think swap is overrated and overused. If your swap is being used a lot, buy more RAM, it’s cheap and a much better experience.
I though that the recommended swap partition was to double until 16 GB? So at 32GB of ram use 32GB of swap?
You should just maintain awareness of how much you’re using. I think 32gb ram + 32gb swap is ridiculous, frankly. Fedora by default sets zram up to 8gb, with no other swap space configured. Works very well that way.
Personally I’d also probably not ever set up more than 16gb of swap space. If I’m somehow hitting that limit it’s because I actually just need to buy more RAM.
Yeah I was thinking of adding swap as my other systems have lots more.
This is just the default on yunohost.