Swap fills up although plenty of memory is available

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1

My system has 16gb of memory and a 6gb swap partition. Despite having more than half of memory unused, the system will fill up the swap partition and (I believe) eventually crash KDE after intensive use of a Chrome based browser (either Vivaldi or Brave). Here is a recent output from free after moderate browser use:

free -h total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 15Gi 7.4Gi 1.2Gi 395Mi 7.4Gi 8.0Gi
Swap: 6.0Gi 5.1Gi 949Mi

Just before a crash this will show the entire swap partition as filled, but still with nearly 8 gb available memory. Here is my sysctl.conf:

vm.dirty_ratio = 10
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 5
vm.swappiness = 1
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

I am using Tumbleweed, but I’ve had the same issue of memory use and Plasma crashes with 15.5

2

This are heavily tinkered values. Did you test with the standards that come with openSUSE?

vm.dirty_ratio = 20
vm.dirty_background_ratio = 10
vm.swappiness = 60
vm.vfs_cache_pressure=100
3

I’ll try them. These migrated from another system and worked well there - but that was a few years ago.