Real Memory 42% vs Virtual @ 99%

Hi

One of my Linodes is always running at 99% Virtual - is that bad? The real memory is at 42% - so don't understand why it's swapping so much.

CentOS 7, LAMP install with a bunch of small wordpress sites.

Currently it's showing

Real memory 3.77 GB total / 1.59 GB used

Virtual memory 250 MB total / 249.21 MB used

Should I increase my swap size ? or increase my Linode memory?

Thanks

3 Replies

The kernel will swap out little-used pages even in the absence of memory pressure. However, in my experience it is unusual for so much swap to be used without memory pressure. It is likely that you have spikes in memory usage that cause things to be swapped out; this may or may not be a real problem.

Overall, you should not really be too concerned by how much swap is used. The more important thing is how many pages are actively being swapped in and out - lots of swapping will slow down your server's responsiveness to users. You can look at this on the swap IO graph in the Linode manager, or by using a tool like vmstat.

Last 30 days looks like this - looks ok to me ?

~~[https://www.dropbox.com/s/yorrx182hjxnrg7/2017-07-1611-36-10.png?dl=0" target="blank">](https://www.dropbox.com/s/yorrx182hjxnr … 0.png?dl=0">https://www.dropbox.com/s/yorrx182hjxnrg7/2017-07-16_11-36-10.png?dl=0](

With an average of 0.00 blocks/sec, you're probably OK.

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