100% swap and high load

Question

Why would my swap space be 100% full if I have over 2gb of free ram? I am concerned about the high load averages for having 2 virtual cpus (1 core each).

Here are the server specs, it is a virtual machine on xenserver:

Centos 5.8 x86
2 CPU
4Gb Ram
1Gb Swap

Top:

top - 10:49:26 up 10:12,  1 user,  load average: 1.53, 1.79, 2.34
Tasks: 113 total,   1 running, 112 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  6.5%us,  6.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 83.2%id,  1.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.3%si,  2.0%st
Mem:   4194488k total,  1831136k used,  2363352k free,   157024k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,  1264688k cached

free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          4096       1795       2301          0        153       1241
-/+ buffers/cache:        400       3695

Your "Swap" is displaying 0k total. What is the output to `swapon -s`? — Nathan C, May 23 '13 at 15:58
Nothing is returned. I guess I was looking at the cached option and then in my monitoring software I am seeing swap at 100%. — ipengineer, May 23 '13 at 16:02
If I do not have any swap space, and I have a large chunk of free memory why would my load average be as high as it is? — ipengineer, May 23 '13 at 16:05
Who knows? You've told us nothing about what might be using CPU on that server. Try `top -s `` for a few seconds and see what's burning the CPU. — MadHatter, May 23 '13 at 16:09
@ipengineer You have lots of free and cached memory, and a five-minute load average of 2.34 is really not something to be concerned about, unless your applications are under-performing. See http://www.linuxatemyram.com/ — pauska, May 23 '13 at 16:12
@ipengineer also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing) for a good explanation of the load average values. My best bet is that you are on shared VPS hosting, which 99% of the times are oversubscribed - especially when it comes to disk I/O. — pauska, May 23 '13 at 16:14
Asterisk is using at max 40% of CPU usage, everything else is hardly touching the CPU. Here is a link to my perf graphs if this helps. What is weird is that cpu seems to be low, memory usage is low so I dont understand why the load averages would be that high. http://postimg.org/image/y5ydrp83h/ — ipengineer, May 23 '13 at 16:17

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered May 23 '13 at 15:58

6

You don't have any swap space.

From your output from top:

Swap: 0k total

answered May 23 '13 at 15:58

pauska

19,532
4
55
75

0 used of 0 available = 100% – creuzerm May 23 '13 at 16:33
@creuzerm Huh? What are you trying to communicate? – pauska May 23 '13 at 16:34
Just reinforcing that 100% swap is correct as you pointed out that there is no swap. – creuzerm May 23 '13 at 16:35
It looks like you're trying to comment on the question, not on my answer. Scroll up :) – pauska May 23 '13 at 16:36
Nope, your comment. You already answered the question with the same answer in a different form than I would have. – creuzerm May 23 '13 at 16:40

100% swap and high load

1 Answers1