How-To view the contents of the used swap memory

Introduction

You may want to view the contents of swap when troubleshooting memory and performance issues on your server.

Procedure

Run the below command to view the contents of swap:

for file in /proc/*/status ; do awk '/VmSwap|Name/{printf $2 " " $3}END{ print ""}' $file; done | sort -k 2 -n -r | less

The output will look similar to this:

mysqld 79528 kB
pdns_server 30620 kB
httpd 14924 kB
httpd 14916 kB
httpd 14912 kB
httpd 14904 kB
httpd 13904 kB
httpd 13768 kB
httpd 13420 kB
tuned 12092 kB
systemd-journal 9548 kB
polkitd 4472 kB