Swappiness (was Re: W7 vs Ubuntu (Was: replacement for VLC: I dont want Qt)

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 13:29 -0400, Derek Broughton wrote:
> Knapp wrote:
> 

> So I promptly used your (and the FAQ's) suggestion of setting swappiness to 
> 10 and noticed an immediate improvement.  The system is still not as 
> responsive as I'd like, but at least the disk isn't almost permanently busy, 
> as it was.  I still need to get more memory, but I can at least get some 
> work done, now.

Check out this link:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000

Interesting philosophical debate about swapiness.  I run my notebook
with the default swappiness of 60.  A machine with a limited amount of
memory and a workload which does not include a lot of big applications
will probably benefit from reducing the swapiness of the system.  Please
note that if you switch back and forth from one big application to
another big application, then reducing swapiness too much may be counter
productive. I think the optimal figure is a function of your specific
workload and if reducing it helped your specific situation then I am
glad the swapiness knob was made available.
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005