[lug] stupid swap question

[Bear Giles]

I have a stupid swap question....

My system has 64 GB of memory, or nearly enough for 3 pages on Chrome.

Obviously I want to remain memory-resdent as much as possible but I would
also like a soft landing when Chrome does what Chrome does so well - I
would rather have some background stuff move to swap than to have to do a
hard reset because the system locked up.

I've created an explicit swap file, added it via swapon, and it shows up in
the system but doesn't seem to be used. It's really odd since this has
worked in the past.

bgiles at eris:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache
available
Mem:           62Gi        16Gi        23Gi       4.7Gi        22Gi
 40Gi
Swap:          32Gi       113Mi        32Gi


The 113 Mi is the miniscule swap partition created by the Ubuntu installer.
You can set partitions manually but it's a real pain when you're using LVM
and encryption.

One thought was that the system is being too clever and refusing to run
swap on an SSD but my root partition is on a standard spinning disk.

Any ideas? I know there are limitations on the number of swap
files/partitions and the size of them but I don't think that's the case
here. The system clearly recognizes it's swap space and it's clearly using
swap - it's just not actually using anything other than that very small
swap partition.

Bear
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