Chase Douglas wrote:
> There's a tunable parameter called 'swappiness' that determines whether
> pages of memory are swapped out to hard disk in lieu of using the memory
> for buffers or not. A value of 0 means memory pages will never be
> swapped out in favor of buffers. A value of 100 is the opposite. The
> default value in the kernel is 60. I would be interested to know if
> anyone sees desktop responsiveness improve if the value is lowered.
I would suggest that swap should be turned off completely (and that the
system should have sufficient RAM to operate comfortably) while
isolating the cause of poor responsiveness in a desktop system. If we
can replicate slow responsiveness under heavy IO conditions where the
heavy IO is not caused by swapping it might be easier to pin down the
reason why the problem is occurring as intensive swapping itself is a
cause of heavy IO.
Chase Douglas wrote:
> There's a tunable parameter called 'swappiness' that determines whether
> pages of memory are swapped out to hard disk in lieu of using the memory
> for buffers or not. A value of 0 means memory pages will never be
> swapped out in favor of buffers. A value of 100 is the opposite. The
> default value in the kernel is 60. I would be interested to know if
> anyone sees desktop responsiveness improve if the value is lowered.
I would suggest that swap should be turned off completely (and that the
system should have sufficient RAM to operate comfortably) while
isolating the cause of poor responsiveness in a desktop system. If we
can replicate slow responsiveness under heavy IO conditions where the
heavy IO is not caused by swapping it might be easier to pin down the
reason why the problem is occurring as intensive swapping itself is a
cause of heavy IO.
Juan