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Originally Posted by kaspars@spam.la
Swap load
Max: 30,91%, Min 0%, Average: 5,649%
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Information like that doesn't tell you anything about whether more ram would help.
To make any kind of estimate, we would need to know, at the times when swap use is near max, what the system is doing and what is process space is non resident.
Output from top when the system is heavily loaded might give us a general idea. But measuring memory load is complicated and I'd need to know a lot about the system use just to know what tools might measure it.
Maybe you have a system that is slow because of lots of ordinary users overwhelming the CPU more than they overwhelm the ram, so more ram would make little difference (processes would still be waiting for the CPU, just taking up ram while they do so).
Maybe you have some large nearly idle services running that the OS has properly dumped out into swap space, because using the ram for file caching is more effective than leaving idle process memory resident. In that case, if more ram decreased swap usage that ram would be wasted (if it increased file caching further, it might help).
Maybe you are running some very memory intensive task that is thrashing in 8GB of ram and could run a whole lot faster if it had even 10GB of ram. I doubt it. But it's possible. Based on the info you provided, we haven't a clue.
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How much % is normal usage of swap?
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"normal" use of swap is very low (much lower than 30% of 8GB of swap). Memory is cheap so many people (me for sure) bought much more than they need. Many people (you probably) overreact to swap usage and detune their system to use swap less thinking that makes it faster.
Using 30% of 8GB of swap is above "normal", but it isn't anywhere near exceeding the range in which a Linux system can run quite well.
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when it is time to add more RAM?
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My uninformed guess is that more ram wouldn't help you much. But if you provide better info, someone might make a more informed guess.
