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.
And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.