https://mrtomlinux.org/tags/swap/ Recent content in Swap on Linux Café Hugo en Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:15:51 +0200 https://mrtomlinux.org/post/2026-09-29-why-my-4gb-raspberry-pi-4-keeps-swapping-duri/ Tue, 29 Sep 2026 09:15:51 +0200 https://mrtomlinux.org/post/2026-09-29-why-my-4gb-raspberry-pi-4-keeps-swapping-duri/ <h2 id="why-the-pi-keeps-swapping">Why the Pi keeps swapping</h2> <p>I was running a memory‑hungry Python data‑pipeline on a 4 GB Raspberry Pi 4 when the system started thrashing every few minutes. <code>top</code> was showing swap usage climbing to 90 % while my script was still busy. The Pi’s 4 GB RAM was the hard limit, and the default swap file on the SD card was the culprit.</p> <h3 id="the-culprit">The culprit</h3> <p>The SD card is the only storage medium on the Pi, but it’s also the slowest. When the kernel starts paging, it writes to the swap file on the card, creating I/O bottlenecks that stall the Python interpreter. The swap file is defined in <code>/etc/fstab</code>:</p>