Re: using swap when there is free ram

[Bruno Schneider <boschneider@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Mar 1, 2019 at 2:18 PM Reco wrote:
>
> Please post the contents of /proc/meminfo. And "sar -r ALL 1 10", for
> the sake of the completeness.

$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        3975380 kB
MemFree:         1886004 kB
MemAvailable:    2307332 kB
Buffers:           49840 kB
Cached:           638404 kB
SwapCached:        28688 kB
Active:          1450652 kB
Inactive:         489336 kB
Active(anon):    1188048 kB
Inactive(anon):   142728 kB
Active(file):     262604 kB
Inactive(file):   346608 kB
Unevictable:          96 kB
Mlocked:              96 kB
SwapTotal:        979928 kB
SwapFree:         764888 kB
Dirty:                56 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:       1166924 kB
Mapped:           336476 kB
Shmem:             79036 kB
Slab:              75224 kB
SReclaimable:      33540 kB
SUnreclaim:        41684 kB
KernelStack:        6864 kB
PageTables:        19652 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:     2967616 kB
Committed_AS:    4608344 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:           0 kB
VmallocChunk:          0 kB
Percpu:              736 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
AnonHugePages:    245760 kB
ShmemHugePages:        0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped:        0 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
Hugetlb:               0 kB
DirectMap4k:      123712 kB
DirectMap2M:     4003840 kB

There is no sar command on my system.

> To prevent it:
>
> sysctl -w vm.swappiness=0
>

I just read some people arguing that 1 is better than 0 because the
later means "never swap" while the former means "swap if out of RAM".
I'll try 1 to see if it reduces swapping, thanks.

Dan Ritter: I agree that swapping activity (and not swap space used)
is what matters. It was swapping activity that started annoying me.