Memory usage

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Mon, 2010-11-29 at 14:15 +0100, Markus Schönhaber wrote:

> So, you can manipulate the kernel's behaviour wrt to swapping by writing
> to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness or changing the corresponding sysctl variable
> vm.swappiness. IAW there's no absolutely fixed point wrt to memory load
> when the kernel starts swapping.
> 

There is also another couple of /proc/sys/vm variable which have an
impact on the use of swapspace - overcommit_memory and overcommit_ratio.
Fiddling with these does impact swap usage.

Here is a reasonably up to date article about how these work:

http://www.linuxinsight.com/proc_sys_vm_overcommit_memory.html

For most desktop workloads on a system with sufficient memory and swap
space, the default works well.

-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
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smoot at tic.com