who occupies the swap ?

[Colin Law]

On Thu, 2 Dec 2021 at 03:12, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote:
>
> At Wed, 1 Dec 2021 18:09:00 +0100 (CET) "Ubuntu user technical support,? not for general discussions" <ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > we have one host with 20.04 which sometimes ran out of swap space.
> > Is there a way to find out who occupies the swap ? In atop the logs show the swapsize for each process, but the sum of all swapsizes
> > is much smaller than the complete used swap.
> > And what happens if processes end ? Is the respective swap space cleaned up ?
>
> It really is meaningless to figure out what is in swap space.  Every process
> uses virtual memory, which is the combination of RAM and swap space.  When RAM
> is used up, the kernel moves unused (or little used) memory to the swap space
> and moves it back when needed.

Robert is correct, don't worry about what is using swap, just look at
the memory used by each process.  If you are running out of memory
then either something is using more than it should, or you haven't got
enough RAM.

Colin L.