How to empty virtual memory (SWAP) in Linux

It often happens that we have free RAM (free or cached) but the SWAP virtual memory is occupied. We can empty the swap memory like this:

swapoff -a

We wait a few minutes (depending on how much swap is used). Eventually we can run this command in backgroud or in a screen. This command clears SWAP memory in RAM and disables SWAP (all partitions in / etc / fstab).

When the command has been executed, we activate SWAP back by:

swapon -a

We can check the memory status with:

free -m

Or you can run everything in one command:

swapoff -a && swapon -a