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...hi was just curious about 'swap tendency', it appears to be set to 60 by default which is fine for servers apparently but is way to high for the normal 'home' user - Pc,s , notebooks ect...is there a good reason for this, or can the 'normal' user re set his swap tendency default setting himself to a lower level for eg...10...and if he/she does will this significantly speed up the system...any feedback would be of interest...thanks...

Setting swappiness to 10 is fine for desktops, especially if you normally have some free physical memory during your day to day use. You can tune it how you want. If you have enough physical memory (at least 4GB), you could probably even run without swap (I do).

I always setup my desktops with swappiness = 0. Currently my main PC has 4 GB RAM and my test PC has 1 GB RAM and both have always the same setup. The default, 60, is idiot, at least for home users desktops/laptops. I also advise you to add another parameter: vfs_cache_pressure. Personally, currently I setup it to 50 but you can play with it to see what is the best for you.

xenopeek wrote:If you have enough physical memory (at least 4GB), you could probably even run without swap (I do).

Yes. But, I guess, you can make this from 2 GB RAM... if your system is set up well.

linuxviolin wrote:

xenopeek wrote:If you have enough physical memory (at least 4GB), you could probably even run without swap (I do).

Yes. But, I guess, you can make this from 2 GB RAM... if your system is set up well.

Probably, though I ran into problems with Firefox locking up on Ubuntu 11.04 and just 2GB memory without swap. I think 2GB is getting tight.

http://sites.google.com/site/easylinuxt ... o-high:-Ub

That's what I used when first dicovering there was such a thing as swappiness in linux. Only talking about the stuff on that page related to changing your swappiness. Didn't try the other hacks the guy mentions. So as with everything ... Use at your own risk/discretion etc.

(afterthought edit) Changing swappiness value is just one of a ton of tweaks I used on Mint 10. Not sure if by itself it'll make an OS blaze. Really doubt it, but did it on the assumption that every lil bit can help boost performance for someone. Does make sense that if your OS is swapping and writing to disk when there's plenty of RAM still available it would slow things down some. I mean disk writes and CPU cycles would likely add up. So yeah ... I'd say there are benefits to it. Just don't expect it to be a night and day difference, shrugs. Jmo on it.

You can temporarily change the swappiness with terminal command "echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" if ya like. Run that command then
"cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness" to confirm it if ya want. There ya go, you're swappiness is set to vm.swappiness=10 until your next reboot. Then ya can change it permanently by following the instructions in that link posted above.

...ok thanks one and all...I have it set to 10 now, from now on...