There have been times where it has been necessary for UNIX Admins to clear out the swap space on a Linux system. In order to do this, you must first make sure that you have enough free memory to hold what is being used by swap.
First we want to see what is currently being used.
free
Then I run the actual commands that empty the swap:
swapoff -a
free
swapon -a
Then I check what is being used after doing this.
free
