Mark Derricutt's Disturbing Thoughts
Linux VM Swappiness
posted Thursday, 6 May 2004
yem pointed me to the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness kernel setting to control how often your machine kicks in the virtual memory swapping, a quick:
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/swappinessand the system feels much nicer already. Damnit - I have RAM and I don't want to swap. Thankyou.
comments (2)
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Friday, 7 May 2004 2:21 am
there's lots of trade offs discussed on the linux kernel mailing list. i
think you're sacrificing your caches and buffers by limiting swapping, so
heavy IOs will probably slow down now.
i had experimented with setting mine to 10, and it did feel more interactive, and it eliminated the sluggish "waking up" when i left the machine sit a while and it pushed all my interactive programs out into swap. it triggered an odd case where swsusp couldn't free enough memory to actually suspend my laptop, though. this could very well be a swsusp bug.
for good measure, i'm attempting another test with it set to 90 to see if i can find any advantage to that.