Linux swapping too much? How to check the swappiness and stop swapping

We could always disable swap but this would normally be a bad idea unless you have an incredible amount of RAM and a workload that will never exceed it.  However, for live/containerized and high performance environments it could be desirable.

Another middle ground may be to set swappiness to a lower number.

You may also want to clear your kernel's cache, which could be eating up RAM unnecessarily by clearing buffers/cache.

Swappiness is the tendency and how aggressively or passively you want to use swap space

swappiness is a numeric value between 100 and 0, with 100 being the most aggressive and 0 being the least likely to swap.

How to check your current swappiness level?

Here is an example on Ubuntu 20's defaults:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

We can see it is currently at level 60, which is a slight bias toward swapping more aggressively.

How can we temporarily change swappiness?

Just enter the numeric value and echo it into the swappiness entry under proc.

echo 30 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

How can we make the change permanent?

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add this:

vm.swappiness=30


Tags:

linux, swapping, swappiness, swappingwe, disable, swap, ram, workload, exceed, containerized, environments, desirable, kernel, cache, unnecessarily, clearing, buffers, aggressively, passively, numeric, aggressive, ubuntu, defaults, proc, sys, vm, currently, temorarily, echo, entry, edit, etc, sysctl, conf,

Latest Articles

  • How To Upgrade Debian 8,9,10 to Debian 12 Bookworm
  • Linux dhcp dhclient Mint Redhat Ubuntu Debian How To Use Local Domain DNS Server Instead of ISPs
  • Docker dockerd swarm high CPU usage cause solution
  • Docker Minimum Requirements/How Efficient is Docker? How Much Memory Does Dockerd Use?
  • qemu-nbd: Failed to set NBD socket solution qemu-nbd: Disconnect client, due to: Failed to read request: Unexpected end-of-file before all bytes were read
  • apache2 httpd apache server will not start [pid 22449:tid 139972160445760] AH00052: child pid 23248 exit signal Aborted (6) solution Mint Debian Ubuntu Redhat
  • How to use the FTDI USB serial cable to RJ45 adapter to connect to the console on Cisco/Juniper Switch Router Firewall in Linux Ubuntu Debian Redhat
  • How To Setup Python3 in Ubuntu Docker Image for AI Deep Learning
  • How to Configure NVIDIA GPUs with Docker on Ubuntu: A Comprehensive Guide for AI Deep Learning CUDA Solution
  • Linux Ubuntu Mint how to check nameservers when /etc/resolv.conf disabled solution
  • Docker cannot work on other overlayfs filesystems such as ecryptfs won't start overlayfs: filesystem on '/home/docker/overlay2/check-overlayfs-support130645871/upper' not supported as upperdir
  • Linux How To Access Original Contents of Directory Mounted Debian Mint CentOS Redhat Solution
  • ecryptfs how to manually encrypt your existing home directory or other directory
  • How to Reset CIPC Cisco IP Communicator for CME CUCM CallManager
  • Internet Explorer Cannot Download File "Your security settings do not allow for this file to be downloaded." Security Settings Solution
  • Linux How To Upgrade To The Latest Kernel Debian Mint Ubuntu
  • Firefox how to restore and backup saved passwords and history which files/location
  • Linux How To echo as root solution to use tee permission denied solution Ubuntu Debian Mint Redhat CentOS
  • Linux how to keep command line bash process running if you are disconnected or need to logout of SSH remotely
  • Linux swapping too much? How to check the swappiness and stop swapping