Hi
This behavior is controlled by the kernels vm.swappiness setting, the higher the value the more aggressively will the kernel try to move apparently unused or seldom used memory pages to swap space.
As MJ mentioned using RHEL 8 that is not necessarily true. Please have a look at https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6785021 The introduction of cgroups especially v2 has changed that behaviour and there are additional kernel settings available in RHEL 8/9. By the way if you have goferd running on your RHEL systems that might also be a reason for swap being used a bit too much. So if "python" as using a lot of swap (as not all of the swap space on MJ's systems is used by mysql) just restart goferd and enjoy some freshly liberated swap space. Best, Cyril Stoll Senior System Engineer Universität Zürich Cyril Stoll Zentrale Informatik Linux & Identity Services Pfingstweidstrasse 60B 8005 Zürich +41 44 634 29 46 www.zi.uzh.ch cyril.stoll@uzh.ch