this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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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
Here is the screenshot

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[–] mvirts@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago

I've been trying to run a stable system with never overcommit and no swap . It's impossible. this is the thing that may make me a kernel developer once I retire.

I've settled for tons of swap with never overcommit but I still can't do normal things sometimes.

The downside to swap is wearing out your disk and latency when swapping, it's good to have swap usage before ram is gone to let the system have more ram available for random allocations. My goal is to never need the oom killer, but it seems like many apps (chrome and FF mostly) basically require overcommit to function.

Right now my system has 30% ram used and is still keeping 700MB is swap. I would recommend to try benchmarking your settings but I don't do that myself so I don't know what to use 😅.

You can try disabling swap with swapoff, then your system is definitely maximizing your ram use, just be prepared for the oom killer to wreck your session.