Hi, I have a smiliar problem on a CentOS 6.4 KVM host. The host has 32 GB memory. virt-top shows: Mem: 30208 MB (30208 MB by guests) vm.swappiness = 0 Guests couldn't use more than 30,2 GB memory! # uname -r 2.6.32-358.14.1.el6.x86_64 # uptime 13:48:16 up 132 days, 1:55, 3 users, load average: 3.10, 2.45, 1.16 # sysctl vm.swappiness vm.swappiness = 0 # free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 32081 31784 296 0 206 2635 -/+ buffers/cache: 28943 3137 Swap: 16111 3220 12891 Swap usage: PID=1877 swapped 415092 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=1925 swapped 47680 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=2012 swapped 37188 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=2114 swapped 555560 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=2154 swapped 191832 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=5299 swapped 341108 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=11564 swapped 327620 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=15383 swapped 218360 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=16299 swapped 11280 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=20391 swapped 946656 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=30963 swapped 23040 KB (qemu-kvm) PID=31248 swapped 169680 KB (qemu-kvm) Overall swap used: 3285096 KB What's going wrong? vm.swappiness ist set to 0 and the system has enough free memory without need of swapping? -- Chris 2013/12/12 Devin Reade <gdr@xxxxxxx> > --On Tuesday, December 10, 2013 08:18:09 AM -0800 John R Pierce > <pierce@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > during idle time, dirty pages will be written to swap so they can then > > be discarded if needed. ignore it, it means nothing > > Agreed. If you want to see if paging is actually an issue, > run "vmstat -5" and ignore the first line of output. If, over time, > you're seeing consistently high values for the si and so columns, > then you have something to investigate. If they're usually > low or zero, then ignore your swap usage. > > Same thing goes for the "free" values in top and vmstat; having > low free memory counts in a long running kernel is normal and > can be ignored. (Too many people, especially coming from the > windows world, get wrapped around the handle about this.) > > If you want to maintain a historical record of memory and other > performance indicators that you can use for investigative purposes > after the fact, see the man page for sar(1). > > Devin > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos