On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:04:51 +0000, Chris Dennis <cgdennis@???>
wrote:
> On 02/11/10 13:26, Vic wrote:
>>
>>> Can any explain, or have pointers to documentation, which give examples
>>> of what sort of behaviour to expect for different values?
>>
>> I set the swappiness to 20, and it makes a world of difference to the
>> responsiveness of the system. Older laptops are especially susceptible
to
>> over-aggressive swapping because the disk I/O is often so slow...
> I didn't know about swappiness before, but my desktop machine does get a
> bit 'latent' sometimes, so I'll try toying with this value.
>
>
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What%20is%20swappiness%20and%20how%20do%20I%20change%20it?
Yeah, I found that. It doesn't really say what the numbers mean however.
For all I know, the code could look something like:
if (swappiness < 50) {
// Use strategy X
} else {
// Use strategy Y
}
Or it could be based on percentage of free memory, with each point of
difference providing a gradual change in behaviour. I get the impression
that it's closer to the latter, but haven't found any good descriptions
(I'm aware that I could RTFS if I wasn't quite so lazy).
I've set things to 20 for now, and I'll see if people notice any
difference.
Thanks.
--
Samuel Penn
sam@???
