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    Swap use and normalization time

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • JonathanLeeJ
      JonathanLee
      last edited by JonathanLee

      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?

      Make sure to upvote

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        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.

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        • JonathanLeeJ
          JonathanLee @stephenw10
          last edited by

          @stephenw10 there has got to be some timer right until it normalizes ?

          Make sure to upvote

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            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

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