Swappiness (was Re: W7 vs Ubuntu (Was: replacement for VLC: I dont want Qt)

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Tue, 2009-01-20 at 22:55 +0100, Knapp wrote:

> I have 2gb of ram but click from one desktop to the other was always
> slow as it would get swapped out, same with programs. Once I set the S
> to 10 all the BS stopped and things are much snappier now. Sometimes I
> wonder if I should try 1 or 0!

You could try zero.  Basically, the inactive pages in memory do not get
returned to the available pool as quickly.  Eventually, they do get
recycled.  I did have similar issues when I only had 2gb and was running
several VMware virtual machines.  It was taking a long time for the VMs
to page back in.  It was interesting watching this behavior using "top".

I found going from 2gb to 4gb made a significant improvement in
performance.  In general at 4gb with my workload (Firefox, Evolution,
OpenOffice, VMware) my pageout rate is practically zero which means I am
keeping loaded programs in memory.  Of course, since Linux is demand
paged, an initial program load requires disk I/O, but subsequent loads
usually get the pages of an executable image from memory.

> Another trick for low memory machines is to reduce the number of
> windows and also CLIs that you have. Normal CLI is 7!! The only reason
> I can see for having more that 2 is because you have a lot of CLI gui
> programs open like top and MC and all those. The most CLIs I have ever
> used was 3 (Not talking about ones opened under your GUI though). If
> you are mostly using a desktop then you might even get away with just
> 1 being open. Also look for thinks running that you don't need. A
> great big hog is Amarok. You can use the CLI program instead with just
> a bit of work and save a lot of memory and CPU power. I am sure there
> are other things you might do too.

I am not sure what you mean here?  Are you talking about virtual
terminals?  I have never seen them take up many resources.  They usually
just hang around with a small getty process.

-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
Computer Systems and
Network Consultant
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005