The container I run plex on has plenty of spare memory but is still using 100% SWAP. First off, is this an issue I should be concerned with or try to fix? If so, any ideas?
this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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That's because your swap is set too small. It's actually using more RAM than swap, but because swap is 1/8th the size it's already full. Normally swap size is equal to ram. If you don't like the behavior of using swap with low ram usage check out swapinness.
I figured swap would only be used if I ran out of available memory. I'm not an expert at all, so I could be totally wrong about that.
Is it possible that the container is allocating the space preemptively but not actively using it? So proxmox would see it as being used, but plex is simply reserving it. I think I've seen that occur on other containers like home assistant (but this is a VM not LXC). Proxmox says it's using almost all the memory available to it, but going into home assistant itself says it's only using a fraction of that amount.
Yeah this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how swap works on modern systems. Unfortunately a common one as well. Lots of people think using swap is bad and that they should eliminate it or that they need more RAM when they really don't.
Just as likely to be disk caching. Sometimes it's counted as using memory and sometimes not.