allocated

The total amount of swap space in bytes currently
allocated for use as backing store.

reserved

The total amount of swap space in bytes not
currently allocated, but claimed by memory mappings
for possible future use.

used

The total amount of swap space in bytes that is
either allocated or reserved.

available

The total swap space in bytes that is currently
available for future reservation and allocation.

The used plus available figures equals total swap space on the system, which includes a portion of physical memory and swap devices (or files).

You can use the amount of swap space available and used (in the swap -s output) as a way to monitor swap space usage over time. If a system’s performance is good, use swap -s to see how much swap space is available. When the performance of a system slows down, check the amount of swap space available to see if it has decreased. Then you can identify what changes to the system might have caused swap space usage to increase.

Keep in mind when using this command that the amount of physical memory available for swap usage changes dynamically as the kernel and user processes lock down and release physical memory.

The swap -l command displays swap space in 512-byte blocks and the swap -s command displays swap space in 1024-byte blocks. If you add up the blocks from swap -l and convert them to Kbytes, it will be less than used + available (in the swap -s output) because swap -l does not include physical memory in its calculation of swap space.