[Bug 516834] Re: bad default swappiness for desktop systems

[Mario Limonciello]

Personally I would say this swappiness should still be resolved in some
fashion.  Since upgrading to oneiric on a few boxes that have 2GB of RAM
i'm finding that compiz will capitalize a sizable chunk of memory which
ends up using up a lot of swap after running for a day or two.  The
performance is abysmal at this point.  There might be a problem causing
compiz to use up this much memory in the first place, but the same thing
happens if you leave thunderbird running with several mail accounts with
multi GB mbox files.

So be it a ubuntu specific kernel patch to set a different default, a
sysctl conf file, or an init script, I think this should still be fixed
at least for the desktop scenario.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/516834

Title:
  bad default swappiness for desktop systems

Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed
Status in “procps” package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix
Status in “linux” package in openSUSE:
  New

Bug description:
  I am reporting this as a kubuntu-desktop bug, but I imagine it will
  apply equally to all desktop flavours.

  I did a clean install of Kubuntu on my laptop, which has 3GB RAM. I
  didn't create a swap partition. Afterwards I installed swapd and set
  it running. The performance was terrible. There was an awful lot of
  unnecessary memory swapping which slowed the machine to a crawl.

  I fixed this by changing the swappiness from 60 to 10, and making the
  change permanent in /etc/sysctl.conf. The gratuitous swapping stopped
  and the machine is responsive, as it should be. In other words the
  default swappiness value is not appropriate for a desktop system.
  Ubuntu should find a way to install itself that allows variables such
  as swappiness to be preconfigured to values appropriate to the use for
  which the particular flavour of Ubuntu is intended.

  ProblemType: Bug
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Thu Feb  4 01:09:24 2010
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
  InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
  Package: kubuntu-desktop 1.154
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-9.152-rt
  SourcePackage: kubuntu-meta
  Uname: Linux 2.6.31-9-rt x86_64

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