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Why is Swap being used?

M

Mac.User

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 25, 2013
348
6
I have 311MB of swap used, but why? I am only using 6.35GB out of my 16GB of RAM. Shouldn't there be no swap used?
 
A

aristobrat

macrumors G5
Oct 14, 2005
12,292
1,403
The only explanation I've seen that makes sense to me is:

Even when there's no memory pressure, it can make sense to write some pages that cannot be discarded but haven't been recently used to swap when the system isn't busy. That way, if there is memory pressure later, these pages can be evicted from RAM without having to first write them to swap while the system is busy.
Click to expand...

Windows does it too. I have a server that has 196GB of RAM, and the most I've ever seen used is like 50GB. It too swaps out a small amount even though it's nowhere near using all of the available RAM.
 

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