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SubjectRe: Autotune swappiness01
Date
Andrew Morton writes:

> Joel Becker <Joel.Becker@oracle.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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).
>>
>
> Yes, I think 60% is about right for a 512-768M box. Too high for the
> smaller machines, too low for the larger ones.

Sigh..

I have a 1Gb desktop machine that refuses to keep my applications in ram
overnight if I have a swappiness higher than the default so I think lots of
desktop users with more ram will be unhappy with higher settings.

> More intelligent selection of the initial value is needed.

Perhaps, but I really doubt desktop users running mainline would be happy
about it going significantly higher.

Cheers,
Con

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