📖 ~1 min read
Table of contents
Symptom & Impact
Interactive and API response times spike as system spends excessive time paging memory to disk.
Environment & Reproduction
Typical on memory-constrained hosts with bursty workloads and default swappiness behavior.
Root Cause Analysis
Working set exceeds available RAM, causing frequent page eviction and high I/O wait overhead.
Quick Triage
Measure swap in/out rates, protect critical services, and reduce transient memory pressure rapidly.
Step-by-Step Diagnosis
Profile top memory consumers, inspect vmstat trends, and evaluate kernel swappiness and cache dynamics.
Solution – Primary Fix
Tune application memory, adjust swappiness, and scale RAM or workload placement to reduce paging.
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Solution – Alternative Approaches
Apply cgroup controls, add zswap/zram, or redistribute services to additional nodes.
Verification & Acceptance Criteria
Swap activity drops to acceptable levels and latency metrics stabilize under expected traffic.
Rollback Plan
Revert kernel tunables if reduced swapping unexpectedly increases OOM risk for critical services.
Prevention & Hardening
Set memory SLOs per service and trigger autoscaling before persistent swap pressure begins.
Related Errors & Cross-Refs
Relate to OOM kills and high CPU from contention; include linked Ubuntu performance tutorial.
Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
View all Ubuntu 18.04 LTS tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →
Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.
References & Further Reading
Read Linux VM subsystem docs, workload sizing references, and Ubuntu performance tuning manuals.
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