System ground down to a halt

[W Scott Lockwood III]

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 12:58 PM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 20 May 2016 at 19:28, Paul Smith <paul at mad-scientist.net> wrote:
>> Remember it's not just your programs which use RAM: the kernel uses it
>> too for all kinds of things.  The more swap you have the more idle
>> processes get paged out for various reasons... and the longer it takes
>> them to become responsive again.
>
> https://sites.google.com/site/tipsandtricksforubuntu/system-tips/swappiness
>
> On desktops, personally, if they have plenty of RAM, I make / a bit
> bigger and use swapspace:
>
> http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/wily/man8/swapspace.8.html
>
> I've also used zRam with some success:
>
> https://www.netroby.com/view/3631
>
> Neither works with hibernation, though.


Not only that, but frankly, if you don't want the kernel to consume
all your swap, learn to adjust it. Here's a hint:

echo 'vm.swappiness = 10' >> /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10

--
W. Scott Lockwood III