Swap space is being used when I have lots of ram available

I am not really sure this is an issue but just something I don’t really understand. On my computer I have 64GB of ram and I almost never go over 7-8GB used which is close to 11+% of the ram. For some reason I keep having something close to 180Mb used in swap. After doing some reading it seems to only use swap when I am running out of memory or memory fragmentation. I am just making sure that nothing is wrong with my computer because I have only had manjaro installed for a few days on this computer.

It’s perfectly normal for swap to get used even when there still is plenty of ram available, see

please read the wiki
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Swap#Disabling_swap

Thank you for this. This is different than the serverfault document I was reading earlier.

I don’t want to disable swap I just wanted to know why it was being used if I have so much ram left over.

… currently here:
ram:
2 GB used out of 8 GB available

swap:
120 M of 10 GB used

after multiple sleep cycles, heavy browser use
and several virtual machines having been booted up - and shut down again
(Gnome Boxes, virt-manager and Virtualbox)
and one rather large update (not involving the kernel)
and several packages removed also

it’s there (the memory, the swap space …) - why not use it? :wink:

Why should I worry about or second guess what the kernel memory management sees fit to do with the available memory?

Why would you insist on RAM being used till it’s exhausted?

That’s not your job - it’s the kernel’s job. :wink:

System wear.
HDDs and SSDs have limited read and writes and are more expensive.

7031 was my zip code once
It was a rather rhetorical question - and it had context. :wink: