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In htop, there appear bars that show CPU, MEMORY and SWAP.

In What exactly do the colors in htop status bars mean? , I saw the meaning of the colors for the CPU bar and the MEMORY bar.

What do the colors mean in the swap bar?

I could find no mention in the htop man.

Community
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josinalvo
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2 Answers2

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The Swap Bar has only one colour (red) which simply indicates how much swap memory is being used. You can see this by pressing h (or F1) while running htop.

Anthony Geoghegan
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Hitting F1 will show this (most probably this wasn't available 7 years ago!): htop help

Which means:

  • red is used swap, that can't be removed
  • orange is cached swap, that can be removed if needed

When you go out of used space, kernel will launch Out-of-memory killer (OOM killer) to free some memory (be it in RAM or Swap).

You can retrieve the Swap cached/used values with /proc/meminfo:

# grep Swap /proc/meminfo
SwapCached:       430276 kB
SwapTotal:       2097136 kB
SwapFree:              0 kB
Yvan
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