Improving OOTB performance

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, May 14, 2012 1:07 pm, Sergey \"Shnatsel\" Davidoff wrote:

> No swap at all sounds like overreaction. You'd better decrease swappiness
> and swap to zram if really needed. Swapping to zram has no noticeable
> overhead on my machine, and it allows to fit 3+ Gb of data into my 2Gb RAM
> if I need it, and only after that falls back to disk swap. Disk swap is
> used only for hibernation nowadays; swapping executable code to disk
> commonly referred to as "swapping death".

I tried zram. It is better than swap for some things. It certainly gives a
nicer user experience. However, it also shrinks my ram space. Any audio
app that ends up in zram gives me a dropout. So I can actually run fewer
audio apps at the same time, few synths, fewer tracks, fewer effects...
for the same ram size. To be fair, I did run my test with swappiness left
to the stock setting (60 I think) so I will also do some more testing with
a lower value.

Ram upgrades are not costly... a bit more for a netbook or laptop. but
still a good first step. Or, just be happy with what can be done with what
I have. I'm still not sure swap (of any kind) is a good deal for audio.

-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net