Hello,

I hope one of you can help me out here.

I'm having a hard time figuring out why my linode is swapping. Around 80% memory is going to disk cache, so I thought it would be logical to release a bit of that instead of swapping.

Take a look at this munin-graph:



When all free memory has been eaten by disk cache, it starts to swap. It shouldn't be like that, right?

I'm running:

3.0.4-linode38
Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS
PHP, Apache, Mysql

I haven't touched vm.swappiness (still at 60).

Any ideas?

- Magnus

Your kernel disagrees.

If the disk is frequently accessed but there are some idle apps, it makes more sense for the kernel to swap out the idle apps instead of sacrificing disk performance. Besides, you're only swapping a few kilobytes per second, compared to several gigabytes of disk cache. Nothing to worry about.

Hi hybinet

You got a point there. I don't like the idea that machinery disagrees with me, though.

Thanks for your response.

- Magnus

It is doing what you told it to do by leaving swappiness at the default. If you would rather lose disk cache than swap, then change the setting lower.

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