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Swap usage

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Can someone educate me, or point me to a good article, so that I can understand swap usage. My average app mem usage is 122MB, cache 200MB and buffers 93MB, yet my average swap usage is 30MB, peaking at 90MB.

According to my (naive) understanding, I thought swap is only used when real memory is exhausted. Will swap still be used with only 122MB of app memory used?

Take a look at my Munin graph (will give warning due to self-signed SSL cert) for details:

https://emerson.oct5.org/munin/oct5.org … y-week.png">https://emerson.oct5.org/munin/oct5.org/emerson.oct5.org-memory-week.png

Any thoughts? Is this normal, or is tweaking required?

Richard

3 Replies

I had the same question some time ago, and everything was clarified in this post: http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5981

Ah, OK.

So, in normal use, some swapping is a good thing.

Thanks!

@hobbes7:

So, in normal use, some swapping is a good thing.
Having some swap space being used (statically) is a good thing, swapping (actively) is a bad thing. As long as what is swapped is really stuff that isn't being used you are OK.

Google "swappiness" to learn all about how you can influence the kernel's tendency to swap.

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