RHEL 8: Premature swapping with swappiness=0 while there is still plenty of pagecache to be reclaimed

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • Even if memory is under pressure with swappiness=0, the inactive pagecache is swapped out instead of pagecache being reclaimed.
  • The system wide swappiness value specified at /proc/sys/vm/swappiness has little-to-no effect on the swap characteristics of a system with CgroupV1. This issue may lead to unexpected and inconsistent swap behaviour.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8
  • systems utilizing Cgroups v1

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