I have noticed that my home server is strangely using lots of swap (~5 GB), despite having only a few lightweight processes running and loads of RAM installed (32 GB).
Upon configuring Grafana + Prometheus, I noticed a trend where cache + buffer will progressively increase until swap starts to be used. My system and services combined will use ~8 GB RAM. Upon rebooting, the cache + buffer will start anywhere from 3–10 GB, progressively ramp up to ~25 GB in 1–2h, where swap will start to be needed (~3 GB). See the image attached for reference.
My swap filesystem is on an expensive (to me) SSD, and I would like to reduce its wear by as much as possible. I understand that swap can introduce only minimal wear on SSDs depending on its nature and that it can be harmless, but I am still not sure what is causing this behavior (and why) and whether I should worry about it or not. So I figured I should investigate what is happening here.
My main question is, how can I figure out what is causing this behavior? Is it expected? I am looking for guidance from others who are more experienced than me in the topic.
A little bit about my system:
I am running Debian 12 on an NVMe SSD containing the root partition (btrfs) and docker services. I also have two HDDs, one with persistent data (ext4), and the other with backups (ext4). This is majoritarily a single-user machine. I tried using the following kernel parameters, but it hasn’t helped:
vm.swappiness=10
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=200
My docker services are:
- *arr stack
- jellyfin
- nextcloud
- immich
- open-webui + ollama
- pi-hole
- invidious
- romm
- nginx proxy manager
- grafana + prometheus
- other minor services that I don’t think are doing much (uptime-kuma, stirlingpdf, vaultwarden, etc)
Seeing high cache and buffer numbers is usually a good sign, as it means the system is making full use of the memory you have. It’ll automatically deallocate it if something actually needs the memory, but until then it’s using it to store data you might need.
Swap’s a funny one, and whilst you can tune it to an astonishing degree, the decisions the kernel makes aren’t always what you’d want. With this little actual memory usage, compared to the installed RAM, you might be able to run without swap at all, unless you want something like hibernate. If you want to test that, you can run (as root)
swapoff -a, which should disable all swap devices, pushing needed pages back in to RAM, but only until you reboot. If it’s stable, you can consider removing the swap partition(s) later.