Hi Jonathan,

Thank you for your question regarding the swapped_warn event.

In IBM Spectrum Scale, different categories of health events serve different 
purposes:

State-change events (such as degraded, failed, etc.) indicate actual problems 
or failures. These events typically resolve automatically; only a small number 
require manual resolution using the mmhealth event resolve command.
TIP events provide recommendations or highlight minor issues, best‑practice 
deviations, or configuration optimizations. These events do not indicate a 
failure. If desired, TIP events can be permanently hidden using mmhealth event 
hide, and once hidden they will not appear again.

The swapped_warn event falls into the TIP event category.

You are correct that a small amount of swap usage is not necessarily 
problematic, especially when plenty of RAM is available and the system is not 
actively swapping. However, we have seen multiple real-world cases where even 
moderate swap usage negatively impacted system responsiveness and overall Scale 
performance.

Because of this, the TIP is intended to help users who want to extract maximum 
performance from their systems. If swap usage is not a concern in your 
environment, you can safely hide the TIP and continue operating normally.

I hope this clarifies the purpose of the event and the available options. 
Please let me know if you need any additional information.


best regards

Mathias Dietz

Storage Scale RAS Architect

IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Wolfgang Wendt
Geschäftsführung: David Faller
Sitz der Gesellschaft: Böblingen / Registergericht: Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRB 
243294
________________________________
From: gpfsug-discuss <[email protected]> on behalf of Jonathan 
Buzzard <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2026 11:32 PM
To: gpfsug main discussion list <[email protected]>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [gpfsug-discuss] swapped_warn event


I have a question about the swapped_warn event. It would appear the only
way to clear this message is to reboot the node or do a swapoff/swapon

If I try an mmhealth event resolve swapped_warn I get a message to say
swapped_warn is not manually resolvable.

Looking at one of the nodes showing this event, there is 1.2GB of swap
being used which is not usual on a Linux server. There is however 160GB
of free RAM, the server is not actually "swapping" at the moment and the
event is not resolving.

It does not appear to be a configurable threshold either.

So given that a Linux server is likely to "use" swap even if it has
*never* actually ran out of RAM and swapped since it was booted. What's
the purpose of this event and can I do something about it?


JAB.

--
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG


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