Re: konqueror heavy swapping

[Florian Kulzer <florian@molphys.leidenuniv.nl>]

Frank Van Damme wrote:
[...]

> Recently, the family complains about my computers performance. We use
> this pc with me (kde) and 1-2 others running windowmaker and kmail +
> maybe one or 2 light applications. Whenever I am logged in, their
> session becomes dog slow to load (probably swapped out), and doing
> things like opening a new konqueror window takes ages.
>
> My kernel version: 2.6.15.1 (vanilla)
> I have 256 MB of Ram. Should be enough for anyones desktop.

Did you ever try to adjust the "swappiness" of your system? I think it
is set quite high by default on Debian. This means that the kernel will
swap out sleeping processes quite aggressively as soon as there is the
slightest possibility that the RAM might be needed at some point in the
future. This is probably a good idea on a server. However, on desktop
machines, when latency in user interactions is a major annoyance, it is
usually better to set the swappiness to a low value. I use a swappiness
of 10 (the scale is 0-100) and I am quite happy with the resulting
behavior. You can find out your swappiness with
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
and change it with
# echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
If a lower swappiness improves your issues with konqueror you can make
the setting persistent over reboots by adding the line
vm.swappiness = 10
to your /etc/sysctl.conf.

Regards,
           Florian