Pancho  writes:
> On 25/01/2020 09:00, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> What would matter is the system swqpping lots of things back in; that
>> would impact performance. But you’ve not measured that, as far as I can
>> tell. Nothing you’ve yet posted is inconsistent with the normal eviction
>> of idle pages from RAM.
>
> Is writing a page to swap the same as evicting it from RAM? Naively I
> would have thought it would just mark the page as ready for eviction,
> i.e. eviction from RAM would only occur after some further kind of
> ageing process and/or more memory pressure.

A fair point. I don’t know how those pages (i.e. written to swap but
still available in RAM) are accounted for in the figures we get to see.

> Apologies if my terminology isn't quite correct, I did used to know
> the basics of virtual memory for VMS but that was some decades ago. I
> don't think I've ever read a good description of how linux (or unix)
> handles it. Can anyone recommend a good technical overview of the
> subject, if such a thing exists.
>
> FWIW I would worry about a slowly growing swap file as being
> symptomatic of a memory leak, but that may be due to my lack of
> understanding.

It could be, but (at the levels shown here) I don’t think there’s any
evidence of that.

--
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