Is swapping bad to hard drives lifetime ?

[Smaily]

I've heard from somewhere that if server is using swapping constantly then eventually you have to buy new hard drives because they get killed off like that.

So I have,
Total processors: 8 (2xQuad core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5405 @ 2.00GHz)
RAM: 32GB (16x2GB)
Interface is running bond mode 6.
Plenty of hard drives to cover 12TB of Disk Space in Raid 0 (4x4TB)

I have found few threads about swapping and read them through.
http://forums.cpanel.net/f34/memory-usage-apparently-higher-than-expected-308861.html#post1277421
performance - Why use swap when there is more than enough RAM - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
Linux: Should You Use Twice the Amount of Ram as Swap Space?
http://www.chrisjohnston.org/ubuntu/why-on-linux-am-i-seeing-so-much-ram-usage

However in my case when RAM usage reaches up to 20-25% it starts to use swap. But seriously isn't it more healthyer for server to use purely RAM without swapping? Also there is no way whatsoever to clear swap using without restarting the server. RAM usage seems to be more safe.

I have Linux system and if I would switch default that is about 3/4 of system ram in use or more equals swap usage - Into some less swap usage like 0.5 instead of 0.6 meybe? I've heard it's not good to zerofy swap usage out either because then RAM usage goes twice as high immediately.

#cat /proc/swaps

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/dm-1                               partition       4063224 0       -1

#swapon -s

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/dm-1                               partition       4063224 0       -1

# free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:         32112      11029      21082          0        411       4093
-/+ buffers/cache:       6525      25587
Swap:         3967          0       3967

# top

top - 01:24:17 up 4 days,  7:00,  1 user,  load average: 0.22, 0.15, 0.15
Tasks: 364 total,   1 running, 361 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie
Cpu0  :  1.0%us,  0.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.5%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu1  :  1.0%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu2  :  3.4%us,  1.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 95.1%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu3  :  2.0%us,  1.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 97.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu4  :  0.5%us,  0.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu5  :  1.0%us,  0.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 98.5%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu6  :  0.5%us,  0.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Cpu7  :  3.9%us,  1.5%sy,  0.0%ni, 94.6%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  32883272k total, 11302132k used, 21581140k free,   421148k buffers
Swap:  4063224k total,        0k used,  4063224k free,  4191768k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S 11.9  0.0 533:48.61 [ksoftirqd/0]
    9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  4.9  0.0 310:44.05 [ksoftirqd/1]
   13 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  4.5  0.0 163:19.83 [ksoftirqd/2]
   29 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  2.5  0.0  63:10.00 [ksoftirqd/6]
   33 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  2.0  0.0  60:08.67 [ksoftirqd/7]
 6075 nobody    20   0  163m  57m 3256 S  2.0  0.2   0:10.61 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k
 5140 nobody    20   0  163m  58m 3452 S  1.5  0.2   0:12.20 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k
17214 root      20   0 15308 1468  948 R  1.0  0.0   0:00.05 top
 1407 root      20   0  150m  15m 1460 S  0.5  0.0   0:04.39 lfd - sleeping
 1726 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.5  0.0   0:51.57 [bond0]
16908 mailnull  20   0  301m  79m 4316 S  0.5  0.2   0:02.31 MailScanner: waiting for messa

# cat /proc/meminfo

MemTotal:       32883272 kB
MemFree:        21590552 kB
Buffers:          421168 kB
Cached:          4192168 kB
SwapCached:            0 kB
Active:          9768000 kB
Inactive:         621904 kB
Active(anon):    5776872 kB
Inactive(anon):       32 kB
Active(file):    3991128 kB
Inactive(file):   621872 kB
Unevictable:           0 kB
Mlocked:               0 kB
SwapTotal:       4063224 kB
SwapFree:        4063224 kB
Dirty:               680 kB
Writeback:             0 kB
AnonPages:       5776576 kB
Mapped:            30984 kB
Shmem:               372 kB
Slab:             494144 kB
SReclaimable:     390960 kB
SUnreclaim:       103184 kB
KernelStack:        3376 kB
PageTables:        54896 kB
NFS_Unstable:          0 kB
Bounce:                0 kB
WritebackTmp:          0 kB
CommitLimit:    20504860 kB
Committed_AS:    8807312 kB
VmallocTotal:   34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed:      104408 kB
VmallocChunk:   34359591104 kB
HardwareCorrupted:     0 kB
AnonHugePages:   3201024 kB
HugePages_Total:       0
HugePages_Free:        0
HugePages_Rsvd:        0
HugePages_Surp:        0
Hugepagesize:       2048 kB
DirectMap4k:        7488 kB
DirectMap2M:    33546240 kB

Where, in which files in Linux can swap limits be changed?

# locate swap

/home/.cpanm/work/1373665143.30705/BSD-Resource-1.2906/blib/lib/auto/BSD/Resource/nswap.al
/home/.cpanm/work/1373810466.27407/BSD-Resource-1.2907/blib/lib/auto/BSD/Resource/nswap.al
/home/virtfs/cf/sbin/mkswap
/home/virtfs/cf/sbin/swapoff
/home/virtfs/cf/sbin/swapon
/sbin/mkswap
/sbin/swapoff
/sbin/swapon
/usr/include/byteswap.h
/usr/include/bits/byteswap.h
/usr/include/sys/swap.h
/usr/lib/anaconda/iw/upgrade_swap_gui.py
/usr/lib/anaconda/iw/upgrade_swap_gui.pyc
/usr/lib/anaconda/iw/upgrade_swap_gui.pyo
/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/devicelibs/swap.py
/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/devicelibs/swap.pyc
/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/devicelibs/swap.pyo
/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/formats/swap.py
/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/formats/swap.pyc
/usr/lib/anaconda/storage/formats/swap.pyo
/usr/lib64/perl5/bits/byteswap.ph
/usr/lib64/pm-utils/bin/pm-reset-swap
/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/perl/514/lib64/perl5/cpanel_lib/x86_64-linux-64int/auto/BSD/Resource/nswap.al
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/swapip
/usr/local/cpanel/perl/BSD/Resource/nswap.al
/usr/local/lib64/perl5/auto/BSD/Resource/nswap.al
/usr/share/doc/db4-devel-4.7.25/api_c/db_get_byteswapped.html
/usr/share/doc/db4-devel-4.7.25/api_cxx/db_get_byteswapped.html
/usr/share/doc/db4-devel-4.7.25/api_tcl/db_is_byteswapped.html
/usr/share/doc/db4-devel-4.7.25/ref/upgrade.3.3/getswap.html
/usr/share/man/man2/swapcontext.2.gz
/usr/share/man/man2/swapoff.2.gz
/usr/share/man/man2/swapon.2.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/BN_swap.3ssl.gz
/usr/share/man/man3/swapcontext.3.gz
/usr/share/man/man3p/swapcontext.3p.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/mkswap.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/swapoff.8.gz
/usr/share/man/man8/swapon.8.gz
/usr/share/vim/vim72/macros/swapmous.vim

 

[ilaurens]

Hallo,

Swapping does not kill your harddisk(non-ssd), Swapping will take a lot of speed away from your harddisk and even make it slower because harddisk is way slower than memory. It is bad for ssd though since swapping relies a lot on write and SSD is write limited.

Swapping could be avoided, it's a last resort before crashing, if it start to swap with 25% memory usage, something is wrong. I suggest you to take action to solve that problem.

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

Are you experiencing any other issues on the server besides the swapping? For instance, is your load high, or is there high disk I/O? You could disable SWAP if necessary, but it's purpose is to help prevent your server from running out of memory. The following external document is useful:

All About Linux SWAP Space

Thank you.

 

[Smaily]

Load went high as 7-8 aswell, yes. Couldnt notice anything that could have caused it.

 

[cPanelMichael]

The following thread may be helpful in troubleshooting the load itself:

Troubleshooting high server loads on Linux servers

Thank you.