Server is slow and swap is constantly in use
With swap thrashing the system spends more time paging than working. A memory leak or simply too little RAM is usually the cause.
support/performance/linux-swap-thrashingsteps: 4
Try this first
- Check free -h and look at swap-used versus available memory
- Run vmstat 1 and watch the si and so columns, high is bad
- Use smem or ps_mem for real memory usage per process
- Lower vm.swappiness to 10 if it is app spikes causing it
When to bring us in
For chronic shortage: scale RAM vertically or split the workload across more hosts.
See also
- My laptop is suddenly slowThree main suspects: a runaway background process, near-full disk, or a Windows update in progress.
- One specific application is slow for everyoneIf an app is slow for one person: local. For everyone at once: server side or vendor side.
- Opening files from the file server takes minutesOften the server itself is fine and the issue is network routing or stalling DNS resolution.
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