Memory Pressure and Swap Thrashing

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents

1. Symptom & Impact
2. Environment & Reproduction
3. Root Cause Analysis
4. Quick Triage
5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
6. Solution – Primary Fix
7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
9. Rollback Plan
10. Prevention & Hardening
11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

Memory starvation impacts throughput and can trigger OOM kills.

Environment & Reproduction

High latency, swap in and out storms, and periodic service restarts.

Root Cause Analysis

Hosts with growing workloads or memory leaks in long-lived services.

Quick Triage

Working set exceeds physical RAM and swap policy cannot compensate.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Capture memory metrics, OOM logs, and top resident processes.

Solution – Primary Fix

Restart leaking process, tune swappiness, and add temporary swap if needed.

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Fix leaks, right-size memory, and enforce process memory limits.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

Confirm low swap churn and stable memory usage over peak load.

Rollback Plan

Profile memory regularly and set alert thresholds for early action.

Prevention & Hardening

Alert on swap rate, major page faults, and OOM events.

Related Errors & Cross-Refs

Revert recent deployment that changed memory profile adversely.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for debian-10.

View all debian-10 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

Debian kernel memory management and tuning guidance.