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When should I worry about swap usage?

JoshP
I've installed two new ASG 220s with HA, IPS, and web and email security on.  For the first few days RAM hovered around 65% with no swap usage.  About 5 days in swap usage suddenly jumped to 10%.  About a week later swap jumped to 20%.  3 days later takes us to today, and my swap usage has jumped to 30%.  Over this time RAM usage has been fairly stable, hovering in the mid to high 60s and occasionally hitting low 70s.

Should I be worried about the increase in swap usage?


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  • 0 in reply to AlanT_01
    Astaro swaps when it needs to, and not unnecessarily. You wouldn't want to turn down the ability for it to use swap space when needed. Swap space should only be a concern when physical memory usage is very high, and astaro is forced to swap when it otherwise would not.


    incorrect.  swappiness simply says how greedy it is with physical ram.  Right now the kernel tries to NEVER let anything new into ram and therefore starts digging into swap much sooner than it should.  performance is not hurt by turning vm.swappiness to zero..it actually improves it due to the system NOT having to heade to the hard disk as ram(which we all know that nonseconds access in ram is much better than microsends in hdd).  I have tested this theory on many systems and have yet to find this to be factually incorrect.

    Owner:  Emmanuel Technology Consulting

    http://etc-md.com

    Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

    PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng, 

    Other addons to follow

  • 0
    https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/51/t/19784

    this details how to make the appropriate kernel changes inside astaro 7.x

    Owner:  Emmanuel Technology Consulting

    http://etc-md.com

    Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

    PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng, 

    Other addons to follow

  • 0 in reply to William Warren
    Excellent work, William, very clearly analyzed and a great solution that Astaro should either adopt or explain how there might be a problem with it.

    Cheers - Bob
     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
  • 0
    I have been posting about Astaro's memory management issues for a couple of years...along with how to fix it.  With Astaro now using a proprietary caching package that's no longer tunable.  I have a multi-proc server at my church.  I may be able to install the beta there and start tinkering with snort tuning(if that option exists).

    Owner:  Emmanuel Technology Consulting

    http://etc-md.com

    Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

    PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng, 

    Other addons to follow

  • 0 in reply to William Warren
    You can tune the # of Snort processes via CC, to save on RAM.

    Barry
  • 0 in reply to BarryG
    Barry, when you do that via CC, isn't the change permanent until overwritten by an Up2Date?

    Do you know what the cc command is?

    Thanks - Bob
     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
  • 0 in reply to BAlfson
    Hi Bob, yes, it's supposedly persistent across reboots.

    The command is at 
    https://community.sophos.com/products/unified-threat-management/astaroorg/f/98/t/67853

    and only applies to the beta.

    Barry
  • 0
    We have adjusted default swappiness to a setting of 30, just as a heads up. Using a swappiness of 0 will actually cause some applications to load much slower than they would normally otherwise, depending on the size of the process and the frequency with which it is called upon.
  • 0 in reply to AngeloC
    Angelo, are you repeating what "they" say, or can you name processes where you've seen this yourself?  William's scientific method looks sound to me, so it might be worth "challenging" the developers with this thread.

    Just a thought...

    Cheers - Bob
     
    Sophos UTM Community Moderator
    Sophos Certified Architect - UTM
    Sophos Certified Engineer - XG
    Gold Solution Partner since 2005
    MediaSoft, Inc. USA
  • 0 in reply to AngeloC
    We have adjusted default swappiness to a setting of 30, just as a heads up. Using a swappiness of 0 will actually cause some applications to load much slower than they would normally otherwise, depending on the size of the process and the frequency with which it is called upon.



    which processes? So far 10 servers all online with 3 of them astaros and more in testing say otherwise to me.  I've been tweaking Astaro since v4 and have spent a ton fo time on v7 as well..some details would be nice since I don't see this slowdown anywhere.

    Owner:  Emmanuel Technology Consulting

    http://etc-md.com

    Former Sophos SG(Astaro) advocate/researcher/Silver Partner

    PfSense w/Suricata, ntopng, 

    Other addons to follow

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