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.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    24 days ago

    What do you think it’s going to help? You sound like you’re absolutely sure there is something wrong here. You sure there’s something wrong?

    • mesa@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      24 days ago

      Might not be, it’s just strange.

      My other Linux machines use much less but have more space designated to SWAP. And using Linux for as long as I have, swap space is usually reserved when there is a huge increase in ram usage.

      • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        24 days ago

        No, not a huge increase. It’s whatever is deemed to be most efficient at the time. You should get more familiar with how RAM is committed and used if you’re suspecting something. Perhaps in this case it’s all just committed cache memory and not contiguous tracts being reserved.

        Get the output of free -m

  • RedWeasel@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    24 days ago

    Swap is used to defrag ram on linux. Could be related to that. In any case this is pretty normal. I have 43Gi available and it is used 700Mi of swap.

    • JoshCodes@programming.devEnglish
      5·
      23 days ago

      Counter point, set the ‘swappiness’ lower than the default 60. I’ve set mine to 30 and the system boots a lot faster. You could research and consider 10-20.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        23 days ago

        What are you using swap for? On Fedora installs the swap is just zram. I think that most of usefulness of swap has passed now that we have systems with noodles of ram.

        The worst case without swap is that oom gets triggered. If 16GB gets eaten up chances are it is a single app anyway. Unless you are doing something you know is memory heavy it shouldn’t be a problem. Also memory is cheap and you can probably upgrade if needed.