SWAP usage running HA OS

[bcutter]

Since switching hardware from Pi 4 to Pi 5 (NVMe SSD) I noticed HA OS prefers to use almost all available SWAP space instead of using RAM (like before on the Pi 4 with a quite slow disk storage).

In general I am wondering whats the reason for this behavior. I mean there's plenty of disk space and it is quite fast, but also there's plenty of (even faster) RAM available not used at all.

During nightly backup it uses even all available SWAP space (100 % usage).

HA OS 14.2.

[Impact123]

You can run this via developer SSH or keyboard & monitor to see what uses the SWAP. I got most of the command from here.

for file in /proc/*/status ; do awk '/VmSwap|Name/{printf $2 " " $3}END{ print ""}' $file; done | sort -k 2 -n | tail -n50 | column -t

Does this actually cause any problems? SWAP usage itself is not necessarily an issue.

[bcutter]

Unfortunately I don't have neither console nor dev SSH access. I'm using the Advanced SSH addon, which gives

zsh: command not found: column

Withouth the latter | column -t I get this which is of no actual value:

awk 0 kB
awk 0 kB
s6-ipcserverd 0 kB
s6-linux-init-s 0 kB
s6-supervise 0 kB
s6-supervise 0 kB
s6-supervise 0 kB
s6-supervise 0 kB
s6-supervise 0 kB
s6-svscan 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sleep 0 kB
sshd-session 0 kB
sshd-session 0 kB
sudo 0 kB
sudo 0 kB
tmux: client0 kB
tmux: server128 kB
zsh 0 kB
zsh 0 kB
sshd 384 kB
ttyd 384 kB
zsh 512 kB
bash 1664 kB
bash 1664 kB
bash 1664 kB
bash 1664 kB
bash 1792 kB
bash 1792 kB
bash 1920 kB

As this behaviour was changed completely when switching hardware I was also / more looking for a general statement on how HA OS handles SWAP usage, so what are the perimeters.

By the way, free -h gives

               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.8Gi       3.2Gi       817Mi       3.8Mi       3.5Gi       4.5Gi
Swap:          2.6Gi       2.3Gi       264Mi

And cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness gives 1.

[bcutter]

As some crazy things pop up recently, like (within the last hour)

• InfluxDB addon stopping unexpectedly, entering an endless restart loop
• Studio Code Server addon complaining about a repeatedly failed Home Assistant Language Server

(so @Impact123 answering your

Does this actually cause any problems?

YES, it seems like it creates some (serious) issues meanwhile ⚠️😭)

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/influxdb-restarting/485508/7

So I'd like to urently rule out the 100 % SWAP usage is a root cause for this.

(host not rebooted since 2025-02-17)

How to make any progress here?

Is it maybe a known issue in HA OS 14.2 with Raspberry Pi 5?

[Impact123]

My recommendation is still the same. Set up developer SSH or connect a keyboard and monitor and run my command to see what uses the swap. If you visit the discord server I can help you with that.