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This is a followup question to my original question related to the Ubuntu 19.10 freeze where I had to restart the machine every time.

I looked up at my swapfile and it is of 2G size. I do have a 16G of RAM. But the memory that is being used by the swapfile is '0'. I don't understand what is going on with this.

$ swapon
        NAME      TYPE SIZE USED PRIO
        /swapfile file   2G   0B   -2
$ free    
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
    Mem:       16383568     2503164    11927228      477108     1953176    13073208
    Swap:       2097148           0     2097148

The following is the image. Can some one help me with this?

Update: The following are the version of the NVIDIA driver I have.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 435.21       Driver Version: 435.21       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce RTX 2080    Off  | 00000000:08:00.0  On |                  N/A |
|  0%   49C    P8    17W / 225W |    394MiB /  7981MiB |      9%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1045      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                            24MiB |
|    0      1444      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           101MiB |
|    0      1652      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         206MiB |
|    0      6468      G   /usr/lib/firefox/firefox                       6MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Update 2: The following are the results of systcl vm.swappiness and grep -i swap /etc/fstab

~$ sysctl vm.swappiness
    vm.swappiness = 60
~$ grep -i swap /etc/fstab
    /swapfile                                 none            swap    sw              0       0

Update 3: Added the result for ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions - Did not have the folder extensions under /.local/share/gnome-shell

$ ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Oct 17  2019 .
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 27 09:32 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 17  2019 desktop-icons@csoriano
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 17  2019 [email protected]
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 17  2019 [email protected]

Update 3: Here I am attaching the drivers I am using for the NVidia. I have tried 435 but I kept on seeing some display issues with it. They come and go. They are something like this.

enter image description here

Now I tried the 430 in the drivers section. This seems to work fine so far. I have seen those out of order pixels but very rarely. What could be the reason for this? And I tried installinng the newly release 440 drivers for the nVidia but it kept on failing and therefore as a lost resort I had to move back to 430.

enter image description here

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10
  • You are not using swap which would be correct. As long as you are not trying to hibernate. Suspend should still work as it does not use swap. Better to just copy & paste terminal output & post that. Have you updated UEFI and if SSD, the SSD firmare? Did you install more than one nVidia driver? You have to purge before install, or else you get conflicts & weird results.
    – oldfred
    Apr 19, 2020 at 19:08
  • @oldfred I have not updated the SSD firmware. I have installed onle one nVidia driver in the system. I have updated the question as you said. Could you take a look at it?
    – Baradwaj Aryasomayajula
    Apr 19, 2020 at 21:58
  • Make sure you have latest UEFI firmware, there were issues last year and AMD published new UEFI that vendors then had to release. And updated SSD firmware is also a good idea.
    – oldfred
    Apr 19, 2020 at 22:28
  • Edit your question and show me sysctl vm.swappiness, and grep -i swap /etc/fstab, and know that at geforce.com/drivers you'll find a newer 440.82 Nvidia driver that you can try. Report back. Start comments to me with @heynnema or I may miss them.
    – heynnema
    Apr 19, 2020 at 22:34
  • Also show me ls -al ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions and ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions.
    – heynnema
    Apr 20, 2020 at 1:16

2 Answers 2

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I would say to just leave it as is. The swap file is a file stored on your hard drive or SSD that is used as a place for inactive data in your RAM when your system is running low on RAM. Also, by the looks of it, your system isn't using the swap file at all. This is because you probably aren't using that much RAM, so your system doesn't need to use the swap file. However, you should keep it to give your system a buffer if it's running low on RAM, just in case you ever do something RAM intensive. Besides, resizing/deleting your swap file is kind of complicated, and is only necessary for very specific use cases.

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3
  • Thanks a lot for the comment. The reason I am worried is because, I might have to perform heavy calculations for my project.
    – Baradwaj Aryasomayajula
    Apr 20, 2020 at 1:51
  • re: "The swap file is a file stored on your hard drive or SSD that is used as RAM when your system is running low on physical RAM. It basically acts like extra ram.". This is definitely incorrect. You don't understand what swap is and how it works. Swap is used to move active, but recently unneeded pages, out to swap, so that memory can be used for active, currently needed, pages, and then swaps pages back in as necessary. It's not an extension of memory, and running low on memory is not a prerequisite for using swap space.
    – heynnema
    Apr 20, 2020 at 14:23
  • Okay, thanks for correcting me. Still though, I would suggest leaving the swap file as is unless you have a specific reason for changing it.
    – Drew Howden Tech
    Apr 23, 2020 at 13:52
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I think your issue on update 3 is that you are using the proprietary NVIDIA driver. In my experience, open-source Linux drivers tend to be more stable than their proprietary counterparts. Also, I find that despite what most of the Linux community tells you, games have the exact same performance no matter what driver you are using (proprietary or open source). So I would suggest switching back to the open source driver, and seeing how well the display works after that.

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