High Swap Usage

sai ravi

Hi
We have PFsense firewall running and have the following issue.

The memory isnt high but the usage of swap seems to be around 70 percent.Amended the screenshot for reference.

I have following services running on my firewall.

haproxy
openvpn
ipsec
relayd

Is there any way to check the usage of swap wrto individual services?

Services.png_thumb

pfBasic

I can't answer your question as to how to see swap usage per process, however you might want to check these out:

https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#idp60039016

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/22576/

Basically, if you aren't experiencing performance issues or if you don't have write sensitive media then things are probably performing as designed.

However, if you do have write sensitive media you have a couple of options:

You can turn swap off:

Manually, I believe you just remove it from /etc/fstab? Google knows though
Do a clean install and specify 0 for swap size

You can create a small RAM disk and run swap there. This is kind of counter-intuitive but if you need to avoid writes but are worried that the system may have issues without any swap at all it's a workaround.

Unless you're having issues I would just leave it as is.

FWIW I've disabled swap on my install (write sensitive media) and have had no issues yet, although I still wouldn't recommend it without a reason to do so.