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Re: Bug#581488: general: lower vm.swappiness by default for desktop installations



reassign 581488 desktop-base
thanks

On Mittwoch, 12. Mai 2010, Marcus Better wrote:
> Package: general
> Severity: wishlist
>
> I have been plagued by long delays with an unresponsive laptop,
> waiting for it to swap in Eclipse for several minutes at a time,
> several times per day. This is a Thinkpad T61 with 4 GB of RAM,
> squeeze/sid, X.org, KDE and Eclipse. (4 GB ought to be enough for
> everyone, right?)
>
> Recently I got the advice [1] to set vm.swappiness to 0, rather than
> the default 60. This improved things dramatically. Apparently Eclipse
> is no longer being swapped out preemptively all the time. The
> difference in perceived responsiveness is spectacular.
>
> Shouldn't we provide a lower swappiness by default for desktop
> installs, at least those with a fair amount of RAM? This could improve
> the user experience on most modern desktop systems. Most users will
> probably never find out to tune this on their own. Ubuntu recommends a
> value of 10 for desktop systems [2, 3] (but ship with the default
> value).
>
> I realise that I don't have any solid evidence that this is a good
> move, maybe others can fill in with their experience. The goal here is
> to improve desktop responsiveness when multi-tasking, especially on
> machines with reasonably large RAM and one or more large applications.
>
> [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2010/05/msg00313.html
> [2] <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What is swappiness and how
> do I change it?> [3] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5481/
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: squeeze/sid
>   APT prefers testing
>   APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
> Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
>
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.33.2-melech (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
> Locale: LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash


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