Re: Autotune swappiness01

[Joel Becker]

On Mon, Jul 26, 2004 at 10:43:01AM +1000, Con Kolivas wrote:
> Low memory boxes and ones that are heavily laden with applications find 
> that ends up making things slow down trying to keep all applications in 
> physical ram.

	Lowish memory boxes with plain desktop loads find that the default
of '60' is a terrible one (I'm speaking of 1GHz-ish machines with 256MB
(like mine) or 512MB (like a guy next to me)).  Every person I know who
installs 2.6 complains about how it feels slow and choppy.  I tell them
"The first thing I do after installing 2.6 is set swappiness to '20'."
Sure enough, they set swappiness to 20 and their box starts behaving
like a properly tuned one.
	I don't know what workload the default of '60' is for, but for
the (128MB < x < 1GB) of RAM case, it sucks (and I've seen the same
behavior on a 300MHz 196MB box).

Joel

-- 

"Maybe the time has drawn the faces I recall.
 But things in this life change very slowly,
 If they ever change at all."

Joel Becker
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Oracle Corporation
E-mail: joel.becker@xxxxxxxxxx
Phone: (650) 506-8127
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