total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 488 106 84 4 297 345
Swap: 3071 448 2623
ps ux|grep 8bitd
theo 7541 52.5 76.4 2219172 382296 ? SLsl 09:27 208:58 ./8bitd -daemon
theo 8632 0.0 0.1 14520 888 pts/1 S+ 16:04 0:00 grep --color=auto 8bitd
So... to summary - 8bitd resident size is 382M while your system reports 106M mem usage and 448M swap usage. I guess your provider is overbooking resources and therefore swaps aggressively. If your provider allows to temporary bump VPS parameters - try 1GB mem plan - it should give instant effect.
If it is your bare metal machine, reduce the swappiness.
I found it helps to change Ubuntu's "swappiness";
"You can find in system monitor that Ubuntu is using swap space although you have plenty of free physical RAM.
This is due to the default swappiness value of Ubuntu. Swappiness is a Linux kernel parameter that controls how often Linux swap out idle processes to the swap space on your hard drive.
The value of swappiness is between 0 ~ 100. Lower value means Linux will use swap space less whereas higher value causes Linux to use swap space more often. The default value on Ubuntu is 60 which means when your computer uses up 40% of physical RAM, Linux kernel begins swapping.
You can use the following command to check the current value.
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
It’s recommended to set a low value for swappiness so that Linux kernel will use as much physical RAM as possible. For example, to set swappiness to 12:
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=12
This command tells Linux kernel to use swap space when 88% or more of physical RAM is used up. This setting isn’t persistent.
To make it persistent across reboots, you need to edit a file.
sudo nano /etc/sysctl.d/99-sysctl.conf
At the end of this file, append the following line.
vm.swappiness=12
"
(from
https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/4-tips-speed-up-ubuntu-16-04)