How to free swap on live system?

humbletech99 · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 1229 Location: London

I've got a server with all of it's swap used up, but nearly 1 out of 4GB of ram free.

proc swappiness was set to 10, I've now set it to 1, but it's still got all it's swap used up.

Is there a way to free up some of the swap somehow while the system is running?
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Akkara · Posted: Wed Mar 21, 2007 11:35 am Post subject:

swapoff should do it - free up all of it. Which might not be what you want if its using more swap than you have ram free. I don't know if you can free up only some.

humbletech99 · Veteran Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 1229 Location: London

swapoff did the trick but I don't understand what happened to the swapped contents that should effectively have been process memory. It's also freed up 2 gigs since last I checked. Did this inadvertantly kill a process I wonder...
_________________
The Human Equation:

value(geeks) > value(mundanes)

x22 · Apprentice Joined: 24 Apr 2006 Posts: 208

swapoff reads all useful non-cached data form swap into memory. (Some data may be in both swap and RAM in so called swap cache.)

I don't know it if simply fails or triggers out of memory killer if it can't make enough free RAM.