I just spent the evening streaming movies on Disney Plus via Firefox browser. Afterwards I checked htop and the Swp was really high (86.5M/100M) and hasn’t recovered several minutes later. The memory usage also appears to still be around 100/150MB or so above what it was powered on earlier today.
Why hasn’t the swp recovered even though I’ve closed my browser and the only thing open now is htop? Could someone please explain this to me?
No idea, but the question is, why do you care?
Is your system crashing or becoming slow or smthn?
150M of swap is high?
Just out of curiosity, how small is your swap if 150M is a big amount in your eyes?
Edit
Now I think I get it, your swap is only 150M big?
But still, why do you care? Do you have any problems?
You can always just increase the swap size, depending of if it is a partition or a file the methods are different.
You can also remove the swap completely, but I advice against that.
Streaming put memory pressure on your system and your swap file was used to free RAM. After the streaming was done, the rarely-used memory remained in the swapfile.
If you want to “fix it” run this
swapoff -a
swapon -a