Why are these using swap when I have plenty of free ram?

[Robert Heller]

At Fri, 08 Nov 2019 19:36:53 -0600 "Ubuntu user technical support,  not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:

> 
> On Sat, 2019-11-09 at 01:11 +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 10:19:15PM +0000, Colin Law wrote:
> > > On Fri, 8 Nov 2019 at 21:44, Chris <chris.pollock1948 at gmail.com>
> > > wrote:
> > > > The below processes are using swap for some reason:
> > > 
> > > If you have a transient situation with a shortage of RAM then
> > > little
> > > used stuff will be moved out to swap. When the transient situation
> > > is
> > > over there may be plenty of RAM available but if the stuff in swap
> > > is
> > > not used again then it will be left there.  There is no reason to
> > > go
> > > to the effort of moving it back.
> > 
> > In a similar way, it might even be not because of any particular
> > memory
> > pressure, but because using RAM to cache things read from disk was
> > more
> > valuable than keeping the memory of rarely-used processes in RAM.
> > 
> > -- 
> > Colin Watson                                       [
> > cjwatson at ubuntu.com]
> > 
> Thanks Colin however one process
> syslog   rsyslogd                      404
> to me doesn't seem like a rarely used process. I'm sure there may be
> others however that just stands out to me.
> 

Some *parts* of rsyslogd are not used much.  Those parts might get swapped 
out.  The swapper does not swap the whole process, only those pages not being 
used.



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