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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Swappiness is set to 10 and the swap usage is still high (imgur.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by penquin@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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Not sure why that is, but I have 32 GB of RAM and I would like my system to utilize it as much as possible, but as you can see in the screenshot, the system is only using 5.66 GB of the physical RAM, but swap is still being used in a high number. Is this normal? Should I lower the swappiness to lower than 10? Should I let it be? Thanks
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[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I also have a 32gb RAM (30.5 GiB) and a swappiness value of 10. My entire swap is full and my RAM is only filled up to about 3.8 GiB. However my swap is just 512mb small (its not a typo, it's half a GB). You should not worry too much, even if the swap is in use, because those parts are probably like "parked" ram area that is not in use for a while now and waiting "to be waken up". And the performance penalty is not that big, if the swap is on a fast NVME SSD. In old days on old slow spinning hard drives, the penalty for using swap was huge (plus the Kernel and rest of operating system was not fine tuned as today).

Some related commands to check:

grep -H swappiness /etc/sysctl.d/*.conf

swapon --show

free

cat /proc/meminfo

Here is an interesting article: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

[–] penquin@lemm.ee 3 points 2 weeks ago

Thank you. I like those commands.