I have noticed that my home server is strangely using lots of swap (~5 GB), despite having only a few lightweight processes running and loads of RAM installed (32 GB).

Upon configuring Grafana + Prometheus, I noticed a trend where cache + buffer will progressively increase until swap starts to be used. My system and services combined will use ~8 GB RAM. Upon rebooting, the cache + buffer will start anywhere from 3–10 GB, progressively ramp up to ~25 GB in 1–2h, where swap will start to be needed (~3 GB). See the image attached for reference.

My swap filesystem is on an expensive (to me) SSD, and I would like to reduce its wear by as much as possible. I understand that swap can introduce only minimal wear on SSDs depending on its nature and that it can be harmless, but I am still not sure what is causing this behavior (and why) and whether I should worry about it or not. So I figured I should investigate what is happening here.

My main question is, how can I figure out what is causing this behavior? Is it expected? I am looking for guidance from others who are more experienced than me in the topic.

A little bit about my system:

I am running Debian 12 on an NVMe SSD containing the root partition (btrfs) and docker services. I also have two HDDs, one with persistent data (ext4), and the other with backups (ext4). This is majoritarily a single-user machine. I tried using the following kernel parameters, but it hasn’t helped:

vm.swappiness=10
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=200

My docker services are:

  • *arr stack
  • jellyfin
  • nextcloud
  • immich
  • open-webui + ollama
  • pi-hole
  • invidious
  • romm
  • nginx proxy manager
  • grafana + prometheus
  • other minor services that I don’t think are doing much (uptime-kuma, stirlingpdf, vaultwarden, etc)
  • Shimitar@downonthestreet.euEnglish
    4·
    17 hours ago

    As a suggestion, ditch ollama and setup llama.cpp. it will work fine with openwebui and it’s much more efficient. (Unrelated to the ram/swap issue)

    • A9nWGzYt@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      13 hours ago

      Thanks for the tip. I have been looking into commenting out the ollama portion of the docker-compose.yml file and setting up llama.cpp instead for some time now. I suspect I don’t usually use features such as ollama pull to justify a fully-featured application.

      • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        15 hours ago

        It has been a while since I looked but Ollama use to be llama.CCP with a cloud wrapper before they forked it and rewrote it. In the same way postman is curl with a cloud wrapper.

        Tossing the extra bit will make it use less resources and support the actual project not someone forking oss, slapping on a paint job, rewriting a core function and still calling it oss.