<![CDATA[Swap use and normalization time]]>Quick question say your swap space starts getting used during some update or large amount of snort blocks it hasn’t ran all month and is now running. How long after it is no longer needed does it take for the pfSense system software to normalize the space and only use ram again? Long story short how long until an external drive spins down again after the system stabilizes?

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/topic/190322/swap-use-and-normalization-timeRSS for NodeSat, 18 Apr 2026 16:59:03 GMTMon, 30 Sep 2024 16:39:59 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to Swap use and normalization time on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:34:41 GMT]]>Well I'm not sure why it would ever release that. SWAP would only need to be cleared if it got close to exhaustion.

There are some tunable values but I'm not sure any of them would release used swap.

https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=tuning#SYSCTL_TUNING

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1186604https://forum.netgate.com/post/1186604Tue, 01 Oct 2024 14:34:41 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Swap use and normalization time on Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:48:34 GMT]]>@stephenw10 there has got to be some timer right until it normalizes ?

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1186592https://forum.netgate.com/post/1186592Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:48:34 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to Swap use and normalization time on Mon, 30 Sep 2024 17:18:50 GMT]]>There's no real reason for it to give up SWAP space so I suspect it would be retained until the next boot. 🤔

Unless it's manually removed somehow. But if it's unused I'd expect the drive to spin down. If it's a real spinning drive.

]]>https://forum.netgate.com/post/1186516https://forum.netgate.com/post/1186516Mon, 30 Sep 2024 17:18:50 GMT