Centos clear swap usage

Windows and linux have two different page/swap strategies.

Linux

Linux wants to avoid using swap space at all, and waits until the last possible moment. If you see a large amount of swap in linux, your system likely is or was in trouble. This strategy is good for minimizing overall disk i/o, which is the slowest part of your system, but weaker for systems with alternating periods of light and heavy load (and honestly, that's most of us). The times when your load is already heavy will now be burdened by the "extra" disk i/o, or, put another way, you need to design your server builds with an eye to having enough ram you don't swap even during the highest expected load times.

Windows

Windows wants to treat memory as a mere cache of the page file. Your real memory is always on disk, but it will read/write from the "cache" first if it can. This strategy is good for evening out your load over time; when the system gets busy and needs to swap pages, the current page is already on disk and half the work is already done. This approach made huge sense back when Windows was young, 32MB (forget GB) was still a lot of RAM, and the frequent need to use swap space was a given. Even today this is good for work-loads that alternate between light and busy loads, as it helps spread the disk i/o out more evenly over time.

Modern Windows versions have additional optimizations — such as SuperFetch — to pre-load and prepare memory pages on disk and in RAM when the load is otherwise light, to help avoid the need for extra disk writes when loading a program for the first time. All of this means you can design your system to only need enough RAM for something less than the highest expected load, so you can still have at least acceptable performance all the time, with reduced costs.

Convergence

This concept of measuring or predicting load in a test environment first and then allocating production resources when the load is known is a relatively recent development in system building, made possible, or at least practical, in part with the advent of virtual and then cloud servers. Depending on your load, you may even design the system such that it never needs to swap at all. In these cases, Windows does allow you to turn off paging and behave more like a linux system. However, you have to be careful; if your system design requires more memory than expected you can get yourself into trouble this way.

On the other hand, modern linux kernels are more willing to swap to disk opportunistically than they once were. So the difference in memory management strategies between the two systems is still present, but now less distinct than it used to be. Both systems have their merits, and each watches the other to see which advances they can copy.

That is the output from top.. Look at the following output

free -m

Then look at the free column for the +/- buffers line. That is your true free memory that apps can use. Linux will use all memory for filesystem caching to take load off the disks and make accessing files very quick. The kernel will release the memory used for caching as needed when applications request it.

I'm sure you have plenty of free memory left.