π ~1 min read
Table of contents
Symptom & Impact
Response times spike and throughput collapses due to excessive swapping.
Environment & Reproduction
Happens on memory-constrained instances with bursty application workloads.
Root Cause Analysis
Working set exceeds RAM and vm swappiness encourages frequent page eviction.
Quick Triage
Capture free, vmstat, and process memory consumption snapshots.
Step-by-Step Diagnosis
Identify top memory consumers and correlate swap in/out with application events.
Solution – Primary Fix
Right-size memory, tune swappiness, and cap runaway processes.
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Solution – Alternative Approaches
Use service-level memory limits and workload shaping during peak hours.
Verification & Acceptance Criteria
Swap activity remains low and p95 latency stays within target.
Rollback Plan
Revert kernel tuning if stability worsens after changes.
Prevention & Hardening
Apply memory SLO alerts and periodic capacity planning reviews.
Related Errors & Cross-Refs
Connected with OOM kill events and JVM heap overcommit patterns.
Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
View all Ubuntu 14.04 LTS tutorials on the Tutorials Hub β
Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.
References & Further Reading
Read Linux VM tuning and memory performance diagnostics references.
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