swappiness for older NB runing xubuntu

[Daniel Mons]

The only times I tweak swappiness on a machine is if I'm either on a 
high-end workstation (very different to a regular home/office desktop) 
with lots of local RAM, or building something application specific, like 
a database server (again, with lots of RAM - 8GB/16GB or more).

I don't think tweaking the swappiness of a low-end desktop with not much 
RAM is going to help you out much.  Essentially the "swappiness" value 
is designed to tell the kernel how urgently it should try to migrate 
things to swap.  On machines/servers with lots of RAM and memory hungry 
applications, you want them to stay in memory by preference always for 
performance reasons, even when relatively idle. On a machine with low 
amounts of RAM, you're going to be forced to put things in swap 
regularly anyway, and that's probably a good thing, as stale/unused 
programs should go there while you use foreground tasks.

If you want to speed up older machines like the one below, you're going 
to have to do it the old fashioned way - disable/remove programs and 
applets you don't use, use less memory hungry applications and window 
managers (Fluxbox, XFCE, etc), avoid memory hungry wallpapers, 
screensavers, etc.  Or of course, find some old RAM sticks and give it 
an upgrade. :)

-Dan


Sebastian Spiess wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I came across this blog entry 
> http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/10/02/tales-from-responsivenessland-why-linux-feels-slow-and-how-to-fix-that/
> and I was wondering if this will increase the performance of my mums old laptop a bit.
> 
> the laptop specs are P3 450Mhz (I think so... how can I find out, proc?) 375mb RAM and 512 swap
> 
> Does one of you has come up with a good swappiness setting for machines similar to mine?
> 
> I know that this is a bigger issue on which even Andrew Morton joined the discussion (http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000) so I 
> don't want to start a similar discussion, just fishing for experience.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Sebastian
>