discussion Guide Linux High RAM and Swap Usage: Emergency Fix Guide 2025

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High RAM and Swap Usage: Emergency Fix Guide 🚨​

It’s completely normal to feel alarmed when you notice your server’s RAM usage suddenly hits 100% and the swap memory is fully consumed. This situation can seriously affect your server’s performance and cause services to become unresponsive. In this article, we’ll cover the possible causes and share simple but effective commands to quickly restore your server to a stable state.

Root Cause of the Problem​

RAM is the temporary memory used by active programs on your server. When the RAM is full, the system starts using the slower swap space to handle overflow. If both RAM and swap space become full, the server essentially runs out of memory and may grind to a halt. The most common causes of this include:

• High Traffic: A sudden spike in visitors or incoming requests beyond normal levels.
• Misconfiguration: Service settings that lead to inefficient memory usage.

Emergency Intervention and Fix​

When this happens, you need to take immediate action to restore your server to normal operation. By running the following two commands via SSH in order, you can clear the swap space and temporarily relieve memory pressure:

• Disable Swap Space: This command disables all swap on your server and attempts to move swap data back into RAM.

swapoff -a

• Re-enable Swap Space: After the swap is cleared, this command reactivates it to allow normal system operation.

swapon -a

This intervention helps stabilize your system’s memory usage in a short amount of time. However, it is only a temporary fix. To prevent the issue from recurring, you must identify the root cause of the high memory usage on your server and implement a permanent solution.

 

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You can do this quickly using this method.