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

[Knapp]

>I am not sure what you mean here?  Are you talking about virtual
>terminals?  I have never seen them take up many resources.  They usually
>just hang around with a small getty process.

Yes, that is true but on my pIII system it does make a difference. On
my amd64 x2 I don't worry about it.

On 1/20/09, Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 22:55 +0100, Knapp wrote:
>
>> I have 2gb of ram but click from one desktop to the other was always
>> slow as it would get swapped out, same with programs. Once I set the S
>> to 10 all the BS stopped and things are much snappier now. Sometimes I
>> wonder if I should try 1 or 0!
>
> You could try zero.  Basically, the inactive pages in memory do not get
> returned to the available pool as quickly.  Eventually, they do get
> recycled.  I did have similar issues when I only had 2gb and was running
> several VMware virtual machines.  It was taking a long time for the VMs
> to page back in.  It was interesting watching this behavior using "top".
>
> I found going from 2gb to 4gb made a significant improvement in
> performance.  In general at 4gb with my workload (Firefox, Evolution,
> OpenOffice, VMware) my pageout rate is practically zero which means I am
> keeping loaded programs in memory.  Of course, since Linux is demand
> paged, an initial program load requires disk I/O, but subsequent loads
> usually get the pages of an executable image from memory.
>
>> Another trick for low memory machines is to reduce the number of
>> windows and also CLIs that you have. Normal CLI is 7!! The only reason
>> I can see for having more that 2 is because you have a lot of CLI gui
>> programs open like top and MC and all those. The most CLIs I have ever
>> used was 3 (Not talking about ones opened under your GUI though). If
>> you are mostly using a desktop then you might even get away with just
>> 1 being open. Also look for thinks running that you don't need. A
>> great big hog is Amarok. You can use the CLI program instead with just
>> a bit of work and save a lot of memory and CPU power. I am sure there
>> are other things you might do too.
>
> I am not sure what you mean here?  Are you talking about virtual
> terminals?  I have never seen them take up many resources.  They usually
> just hang around with a small getty process.
>
> --
> Smoot Carl-Mitchell
> Computer Systems and
> Network Consultant
> smoot at tic.com
> +1 480 922 7313
> cell: +1 602 421 9005
>
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-- 
Douglas E Knapp

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