swapoff running forever on LVM volume

Question

I'm currently trying to resize my swapspace on a Proxmox VE server with LVM volumes, as I'm running out of space for LVM snapshots and the swapspace is fairly oversized:

root@rb-srv-gus:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         64394      63917        477          0       1515      39772
-/+ buffers/cache:      22629      41764
Swap:        63487          0      63487

Unfortunately, this seems to take forever or doesn't seem to work at all. After issuing

swapoff /dev/mapper/pve-swap

, the output changes to

root@rb-srv-gus:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         64394      63935        459          0       1516      39773
-/+ buffers/cache:      22646      41748
Swap:            0          0          0

after a moment, but the swap usage stays at 724 KB and the command still keeps running:

root@rb-srv-gus:~# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:      65940084   65458864     481220          0    1553808   40736120
-/+ buffers/cache:   23168936   42771148
Swap:          724        724          0

root@rb-srv-gus:~# cat /proc/meminfo |grep Swap
SwapCached:            4 kB
VirtualSwap:      197852 kB
SwapTotal:           724 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB

root@rb-srv-gus:~# vmstat
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
 2  0    724 449644 1552856 40730996    0    0   112    87    0    1  4  1 94  0

I've been waiting for more than an hour, the command is still running and the Swap still at 724 kB. As soon as I cancel via Strg-C, the swapspace is back to 62 GB.

What I did now was resizing the swap partition to 16 GB without the swapoff:

  --- Logical volume ---
  LV Path                /dev/pve/swap
  LV Name                swap
  VG Name                pve
  LV UUID                UKlpwX-Y6VJ-APsa-toOW-n219-gW0j-BQEm83
  LV Write Access        read/write
  LV Creation host, time proxmox, 2014-03-27 12:06:14 +0100
  LV Status              available
  # open                 2
  LV Size                16,00 GiB
  Current LE             4096
  Segments               1
  Allocation             inherit
  Read ahead sectors     auto
  - currently set to     256
  Block device           253:1

, but free -m still shows 64 GB for swap. Any ideas what I could do apart from waiting some more hours for swapoff to complete or rebooting?

EDIT:

After creating a temporary swapfile as HBruijn suggested, the server uses this swapfile as well but there are still 724 KB used on the original swap volume:

root@rb-srv-gus:~# cat /proc/swaps 
Filename                Type        Size    Used    Priority
/dev/dm-1                               partition   65011704    724 -2
/root/swapfile                          file        10232   1328    -1

swapoff command is still running...

As I said, the `swapoff` command is still running, so I'm not at the point "after turning off swap" yet. — etagenklo, Jun 16 '14 at 11:45
If for some reason swap space is required, maybe creating a temporary swapfile would help? ie. something like `dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=10 ; mkswap /swapfile && swapon /swapfile` allowing your OS to move the swap data from one device to the other? — HBruijn, Jun 16 '14 at 11:48
I currently don't want swapspace at all, I just want to `swapoff` the current swap volume. — etagenklo, Jun 16 '14 at 11:52
ah, now I got what you mean. I've created a temporary swap file. After starting the `swapoff` command again, it looks like this: `Swap: 10956 724 10232`, some seconds later: `Swap: 10956 2608 8348`. `swapoff` is still running, at least it seems like something's happening... — etagenklo, Jun 16 '14 at 12:02

swapoff running forever on LVM volume

0 Answers0