How to send service to swap? Is this possible?

[servimo]

A friend of mine have intense use of Gerbera and it is always using around 24Gb of RAM, it have 32Gb, is it possible to send this use to the swap? As he needs RAM for compilation and others programs

[megavolt]

Hello @servimo

Are there really used 24GB or is it just cache?

free -h

It is possible by changing the swappiness: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap#Swappiness

Btw… this drops the cache:

su -c 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'

[Aragorn]

There is no way to send individual processes or data to swap. Paging is entirely controlled by the kernel, on an as-needed basis. One can change the parameters for swapping ─ as @megavolt said ─ but it’s still the kernel that decides what gets paged out and when.

[TriMoon]

Marking the answer of @Aragorn as solution to the topic title…