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why is some of my swap space being used, when I still have unused RAM?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 20263010 views
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Problem

More of a curiosity than a problem; and, I admit, something of an embarassingly basic question: I've noticed that on many occasions, on my Linux machine I will have ~500MB of swap space in use, even though I have ~600MB of unused RAM. My naive high-level understanding was, swap space doesn't kick i…

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Fix for: why is some of my swap space being used, when I still have unused RAM?

Low Risk

The unused part of the RAM is in fact used as HDD cache. If you think about it, you actually read parts of your disk more often that you access some parts of the RAM. Which makes sense to put this RAM on the disk, while using RAM to cache HDD data.

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