[brobinson]

Turn off swap and clear your caches to see your true ram usage:

    swapoff -a -v
    echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

I recommend `htop` to check out your memory usage after that.

You can also tweak the vm.swapiness variable to change Linux's behavior there. I personally just turn swap off on all my systems as soon as I set them up.

[mkl]

What happens if you turn off swap while using more virtual memory than you have RAM?

[brobinson]

I imagine the OOM killer would take out a process. In that case, I would suggest paying for some more ram before turning off swap. Swap is death for performance! :)

[nbevans]

But necessary.