[Bug 131094] Re: Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness

[Chase Douglas]

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.

Theoretically, if you lower the value your desktop applications should
respond better as you switch between them or on return after leaving the
machine for a period of time. However, if you are doing a large amount
of data transfers or other intensive tasks you may see a drop in overall
performance. For a desktop system, many users prefer responsiveness over
a small drop in performance.

Please see this page for more details, an overview of what you may
expect if you decrease or increase the value, and how to change the
value: http://www.pythian.com/news/1913/

Thanks

-- 
Heavy Disk I/O harms desktop responsiveness
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/131094
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel
Bugs, which is subscribed to Linux.