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Siduction Forum => Software - Support => Topic started by: dibl on 2013/01/06, 14:59:48

Title: Very busy kswapd with kernel 3.7-1
Post by: dibl on 2013/01/06, 14:59:48
I have noticed swap being used considerably more with the latest kernel -- has anyone else seen this?

For example, my main desktop system was sitting idle all night, in init 5, with only KDM running. The first thing this morning I checked memory, and saw this:

Code: [Select]
don@imerabox:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       6109312    2539192    3570120          0     103376    1493612
-/+ buffers/cache:     942204    5167108
Swap:     15114748     234672   14880076


Yesterday, I noticed when I was running a VM that it was actively swapping a little bit -- this was vmware. I have not ever seen that before, with a single VM running.  I have vm.swappiness set lower than default -- to 1, because I have more memory than would normally be needed.

Just curious -- has anyone else observed an increase in swapping?
Title: Very busy kswapd with kernel 3.7-1
Post by: spacepenguin on 2013/01/06, 16:18:39
Definitely yes.
Title: RE: Very busy kswapd with kernel 3.7-1
Post by: dibl on 2013/01/06, 19:50:21
Here is my memory with 2 browsers, 1 music player, and 1 VM running:

Code: [Select]
don@imerabox:~$ free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:       6109312    5996840     112472          0        588    3363896
-/+ buffers/cache:    2632356    3476956
Swap:     15114748    1261412   13853336


This is way more memory than normally gets used on this system.
Title: RE: Very busy kswapd with kernel 3.7-1
Post by: spacepenguin on 2013/01/06, 20:27:42
Current state of my memory: I have icedove, Gimp (1 picture) and chromium (7 tabs) running. Used RAM is 59% of 3959 MiB and used swap is 30% of 2047 MiB. There is enough RAM available so why all the swapping? I'd expect swap only to be used as a fill-in when RAM is totally filled.
Title: Very busy kswapd with kernel 3.7-1
Post by: dibl on 2013/03/16, 18:01:06
With the new kernel 3.8-3, this situation has dramatically improved. Here are my conkys from yesterday (3.8-2) and today (3.8-3):