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

[Chris]

On Fri, 2019-11-08 at 21:06 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:
> 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.
> 
Thanks Robert, didn't realize that. Appreciate the info.

> 
> -- 
> Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933
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-- 
Chris
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