Swap

From How do I tell what process is causing kswapd to be in use?:

kswapd is managing swap space in response to memory demands greater than physically available for all processes.

It is process agnostic, it is only interested in what pages are access and when (it is more complex than this of course but to keep things simple we may as well view it this way).

So the real question is “what processes have the greatest burden on memory that are causing kswapd to need to page all the time”.

That is most easily answered using top and switching to memory usage sort mode.

From How to find out which processes are swapping in linux?, (I am not sure if this is useful, but):

• Run top

• use the f key to see the fields

• use the arrow keys to go to SWAP

• use d to toggle display

• use s to set the sort

• then q