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  • But what is your real problem? The system works as expected, nothing to fear from these numbers. And if you dislike the swapping you can run your system without swap at all. Otherwise see if you are a long running process that hogs the RAM. On my systems it is often the browser... Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 14:26
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    It gets sluggish, because of swapping. But the memory genuinely seems to be used, so swap is necessary. Swappiness is already pretty low (10). None of my processes seem to take up a lot of memory. The most is used by firefox, and that's less than 1GB. Even when I close most processes, most of the RAM is still unavailable. Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 15:56
  • Remove the swap then. In top hit M and processes will be ordered by amount of RAM they use. RAM is not unavailable. Cache/Buffer part will shrink automatically as needed. And as counter-intuitive as it may be the kernel may decide it is better to put things in swap (pages rarely touched, like a sleeping process) than take memory from the buffer cache. Commented Jan 9, 2018 at 16:24
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    @PatrickMevzek, 6GB of unreclaimable slab memory when the active processes use only 1.6 GB sounds like an issue to me because the Kernel is not freeing the memory to be used by the processes, so the system becomes sluggish and needs a reboot. Commented Nov 18, 2019 at 14:59