Where is my Swappiness Coming From Now? [Solved]

[p.H]

Allocating more memory than needed is not a problem, because the kernel does not immediately allocate any physical memory. Physical memory pages are allocated on the fly when they are actually used (page fault).

[bw123]

Allocating more memory than needed is not a problem, because the kernel does not immediately allocate any physical memory. Physical memory pages are allocated on the fly when they are actually used (page fault).

That's a good point, what I was thinking was not really more than needed and never used, but more than needed in a certain situation. For instance, I'm pretty sure that firefox-esr allocates a buttload of memory somewhere somehow for playing audio/video, which I never use at all through the browser. This can go to swap on disk and get out of my way and I have more physical ram for what I actually do. Just speculation though, I haven't really dug into it that much. Xorg and some terminal programs seem have pages that get swapped out to disk easily also.

I'd like to explore better ways to pin it down, so far I've been using top, hitting f, selecting swap with spacebar, then q and watching a little while. there's got to be a better way...