clearing swap space.

Our servers typically have a lot of memory cached and run high on memory utilized. If I have space available and am low on free can I do a swapoff/swap on clear the swap space used?

Below is a sample free from my environment.

total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 251G 53G 2.0G 10G 196G 187G
Swap: 2.0G 1.8G 246M

I'm not sure how you think having 187g available RAM is low? And you're only swapping 2g of 4g total, so I don't think you're in a crisis. Or am I missing something?

You might want to read about swappiness settings.

(I'm apparently a bit behind on my "latest tech" knowledge. I didn't know we have hardware that supports 256G RAM! Is this a virtual server?)

If you still running CentOS, RHEL recommends at least 4G swap for systems >64 GB memory but it depends on what you are running and how you are using this PC. You can easily add swap space by adding a new swap partition, swap file, or extending your existing swap space.

Also, even though the system is using a bunch of memory as cache you are not running out.
https://www.linuxatemyram.com/

It is perfect as it is.
Is your problem the monitoring?
Alert threshold should be based on the sum of RAM and swap (that makes the virtual memory); thresholds on only RAM or only swap are pointless.

But yes, you can temporarily delete your swap. It will take a while, because the on-swap pages must be shuffled into the RAM, and the Linux kernel is slow with this.

There is almost always no reason to swapoff in normal operation. I only do it when doing multiple runs for benchmarking. Hardly normal operation. Note the info in the link in post #3.

www.linuxatemyram.com