I did but I think I just didn’t make the connection. So just for comparison here’s what glances say my RAM usage is over roughly the same period (not quite the same since its 3 hours later but pretty close):
I’m googling now and I think I get it more, I wasn’t understanding how these two metrics were related. Sorry it’s been a long time since my class on operating systems. Googling it seems what we colloquially refer to as memory is really virtual memory which is a combination of RAM and a portion of disk known as swap, the OS makes this transparent to processes. Swap here is showing me what’s happening in that portion of disk allocated.
It seems like swap is kind of a legacy thing of the days when we had way less memory in most machines. Hence why it looks like my raspberry pi only has 0.1 GB allocated for swap space, since it has 3GB for RAM which is clearly enough.
It’s still kind of confusing why swap is being used at all nowsince RAM usage never even goes above 50% but w/e. And I’m guessing once it is used its way less aggressive about cleaning it up for reuse since its disk, unlike with physical RAM clearly.
Anyway I’m thinking I should just stop tracking this metric. Seems like it really doesn’t matter, all it is is a teeny tiny extension of my RAM.