Re: swappiness of 2.6 kernel

["thveillon.debian" <thveillon.debian@googlemail.com>]

Sven Joachim a écrit :
> On 2008-08-05 07:27 +0200, Chris Burkhardt wrote:
>
> > Account for Debian group mail wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > Has anyone played with the swappiness settings of the 2.6 kernel? It
> > > looks like the default is set at 60. I was thinking on this new
> > > machine I put together with 4 gigs of ram that I might bump this
> > > number up a little, maybe like 80.
> > >
> > > Any thoughts?
> > I've never experimented, but it seems Andrew Morton sets it at 100:
> > http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000
>
> That thread is rather old, but from reading it I'd be attempted to
> _reduce_ rather than increase the swappiness.  It's annoying enough that
> the disk cache is blown away by watching a DVD movie, but if you
> increase swappiness your applications will be swapped out as well,
> giving sluggish response when you return to them.
>
> Sven
On a Desktop workstation (multimedia edit, 4Gb ram, timer freq being set 
@ 1000HZ) I've been using 20 for a long time, no problem whatsoever and 
no swapping at all.
From my understanding for a server you need something closer or equal 
to 100, for a workstation anything between 0 and 20 will do, anyway if 
swapping must occur it will and the settings will be overridden, but no 
"provisional" swapping (that's my word, not sure it makes sens...) will 
occur, resulting in a more responsive experience especially when coming 
back to an application left idle for a while.

That's my experience, and therefore my 2 cents...

Tom