Comment 190 for bug 1518457

Same problem on Amazon's t2.nano instance (512MB of RAM). Seemed to be triggered by doing a bunch of file IO. This is a brand new install of Ubuntu 16.04. I have no swap enabled, and yet:

top - 06:42:57 up 1:58, 1 user, load average: 2.43, 2.66, 2.31
Tasks: 125 total, 3 running, 122 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 2.1 us, 6.9 sy, 0.0 ni, 0.0 id, 0.9 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 90.1 st
KiB Mem : 498416 total, 348096 free, 49772 used, 100548 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 free, 0 used. 411900 avail Mem

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
   29 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 65.0 0.0 103:16.64 kswapd0
14343 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 2.9 0.0 0:00.82 python

Running "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" didn't fix the problem, but it did fix it immediately with "3".

Also, my /tmp isn't full at all (6.5GB / 85% left on root).