[SOLVED] Reclaim swap memory

sag47 · 12-13-2010, 03:35 PM

I have 5.8GB of RAM.
I have 6.1GB of swap.

At some point in time my VMs exceeded the 5.8GB limit and overflowed into swap (all dev VMs). I have since shut down the VMs and restarted Firefox (memory hog).

Right now I have 0.73GB in RAM and 0.29GB in swap. I want to move all of the data in swap into RAM where it will be faster. So I will end up with 1.02GB in RAM and 0GB in swap.

Is there a quick command to move data contained within swap to RAM? I know of the swapon/swapoff command. I was wondering if there was another method which clears swap.

no2498 · 12-13-2010, 03:44 PM

? do you not just type free m in the terminal

sag47 · 12-13-2010, 04:06 PM

man free says "free - Display amount of free and used memory in the system". It only displays information. This doesn't free swap at all. Not sure where you're going with that. If it is capable of being my solution then care to emphasize?

I modified my question a little and bolded it. Perhaps you didn't understand my original question.

frieza · 12-13-2010, 04:42 PM

if you are using swap then chances are its because you ram is full, wanna pull stuff out of swap? probably the best way to do that is to get more ram, swap is not like a regular hard drive partition that will eventually get full and need wiping it is constantly being written, over-written and erased as it is used.

syg00 · 12-13-2010, 05:38 PM

Are you talking about the host RAM/swap ?.
There is no sensible alternative to swap{off,on} - why do you not want to use it ?. It's quick, and it works. If there is insufficient RAM to hold all the swap resident pages, the swapoff fails, no damage done.
I suspect you aren't actually using that swap anyway - Linux uses lazy deallocation, and the pages will only be reclaimed (and flags cleared) if needed. So they'll (probably) already be unused, but stale.

sag47 · 12-14-2010, 02:58 PM

Well I tried the swapoff command but it doesn't work with no arguments. I just have to look up how it's formatted. I just wondered if there was a one shot deal which moved swap data into RAM.

Thanks for the responses guys/gals.

Snark1994 · 12-14-2010, 03:34 PM

You need to tell swapoff which partition is the swap partition

For instance,

Code:

swapoff /dev/sda5