high swap usage

[shmu26]

windows 10 pro x64
8 gb ram
my system monitor is showing 49% ram usage, and 52% swap usage.
why all the swap usage, when there is plenty of ram left?
Is this normal?
The computer was in sleep. maybe that's connected?

 

[corroded]

HDD or SSD, System managed Paging or Manual...?

I have very low paging, Same OS

 

[shmu26]

SSD
virtual memory is system managed, I have not played with the page file (yet)

 

[corroded]

you can tweak it... only 1 drive?

I have 3. OS = SSD, Games = SSD, Data and User Profile and other programs = HDD

256 -1024 on OS SSD for Paging and 1024 - 4096 on HDD

 

[shmu26]

I have 250 GB SSD for OS and programs and virtual machines
1 tera HDD for personal files and backups
right now my ram usage is 38% and swap usage is 34%.
this info is from the default system monitor that comes with rainmeter.
what's with the high swap?

 

[corroded]

...VM's... OK. Let me look at my machine w/ VM's

 

[shmu26]

I haven't started any VMs since last restart, but still have swap of 34%

 

[corroded]

Well, I'm running 12GB on mine and w/ VMware and 1 VM (CENTOS7) virtually nothing paged. What are your Guests and how much RAM is allotted each and how many do you run concurrently?

 

[shmu26]

I have guests:
windows XP with 1.1 gb ram allotted
windows 7 with 2
ubuntu with 1.7

but none of them are running, and I have not even opened them since last restart, either.
I usually run only one at a time.

 

[corroded]

I just lit up all the VM's I have on there and kicked off the update on 3 of the 6. 5 CENTOS and 1 WinServer 2012. Using 11.x of 12 GB RAM

Maybe I am looking at usage wrong. How are you determining usage vs total vs available Paging Space

 

[shmu26]

rainmeter system monitor says like this:
CPU 5%
Ram 33%
SWAP 34%
but swap is not the same as disk usage as shown in windows task manager. my disk usage as shown there is 0%.

you know what, I just got a windows update, maybe they have changed something in the way windows handles swapping?

 

[corroded]

I'm looking at my Desktop gadget and just got 2% usage. Gave up on RainMeter years ago.

What CPU? dual quad? Intel w/ hyperthreading? Core park disabled?

 

[shmu26]

what desktop gadget do you use? I was looking for one.
my cpu is i-5 6500
it is skylake 4 core locked.

 

[corroded]

on win 10 I found 8gadgetpack, cannot remember where I go it from. Now I have my Win7 like gadgets back.

CPU meter, Network meter, clock, cal, and disk monitors

 

[shmu26]

thanks.
that gadget pack works, but for a light user like me, it sometimes eats more cpu than any other single process I am running. It used 1% or more, for me. Maybe the code is not written well for windows 10.
So I went for rainmeter, which is much lighter.

 

[corroded]

ok...

I'm done for the night...

 

[shmu26]

I will post here a very informative answer I got from AndreyT on tenforums.com:

According to rainmeter docs, by default "swap usage" actually stands for the sum of RAM usage and swap file usage. So, your readouts indicate that most of the data is currently in RAM and only a small amount has been pushed to swap file.

In any case, there's no such thing as "normal" or "not normal" when it comes to swap file usage. The more "dormant" memory pages you currently have in your virtual memory ("dormant" stands for "occupied, but not currently used"), the higher swap will usage you will observe. This is perfectly normal. As long as your system is running smoothly, without swap thrashing, you are fine.