System ground down to a halt

[Bret Busby]

On 21/05/2016, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2016-05-20 at 19:02 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
>> On 20 May 2016 at 18:51, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
>> > 13G swap is _really_ asking for trouble.
>>
>> Why?  There is no harm in having too much.
>
> Tell that to my system which used to take 5 minutes to wake up every
> morning, because overnight it ran mlocate or similar which caused the
> kernel to push out all my idle programs' memory into swap while it
> cached the contents of my harddisk.
>
> Remember it's not just your programs which use RAM: the kernel uses it
> too for all kinds of things.  The more swap you have the more idle
> processes get paged out for various reasons... and the longer it takes
> them to become responsive again.
>
>> If you want the system to hibernate and wake again, you need swap at
>> least equal to RAM.
>
> I was specifically mentioning desktops in my email.  If you want to
> hibernate then yes, sure, you need more swap (I personally wish
> hibernate would use a separate location than normal swap).  On my
> laptop though, I only use suspend not hibernate.
>

And, on my desktop computer, with 16GB RAM and about 42GB of swap,
which does not properly swap, with an i3CPU, running MATE (not KDE),
it gets about as fast as a PC-XT trying to run MS Windows.

Memory: 87% in use by programs 8% in use as cache
Swap space: 4% in use

Quite slow.


-- 

Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia

..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
 you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
 Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
 A Trilogy In Four Parts",
 written by Douglas Adams,
 published by Pan Books, 1992

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