Hello,
Here's another question (perhaps I should post in the newbies section).
I find that 4G of ram makes the default swappiness value of 60 too high and I usually reduce it to 10.
In other distros I add a line "vm.swappiness=10" in /etc/sysctl.conf but Puppy does not seem to have this directory.
I can find sysfs.conf, can I use this?
All advice gratefully received.

i assume you're talking a 60mb swap file?

best to use a swap partition and fiddle with size depending what your setup is,

standard used to be up to a max of 2x available ram, which is pretty much irrelevant when you have 4 gigs

I have not used the sysctl command at all , and it may be not included in some Puppies .

"sysctl -a | sort d " gives over 500 lines for kernel parameter settings .

It seems that it should be possible to add something like
" root=/dev/sda1 vm.swappiness=10 " in the grub menu.lst
OR
" sysctl vm.swappiness=10 " OR " sysctl -p "
into /etc/rc.d/rc.local OR into a script in /root/Startup
with a own created /etc/sysctl.conf file as i read the manpage right .

Yeah..I use sysctl -w vm.swappiness=xx, and put it in /etc/profile.local with Swapfile Manager.

jpeps

With 4 Gig;
- why use puppy ?
- and why would you care about the swappiness value ?.

1. I would use puppy on any machine, and follow it's development closely.
2. Decreasing the swappiness number inhibits usage, thus speeding up operations if you have sufficient ram. You can test it out by running multiple processes, such as videos, open office, firefox, etc.

I know what swappiness is for - the OP stated 4 Gig RAM. With that I'd expect no swapping - especially on puppy. Hence fiddling with swappiness is pointless.

Pointless for you. Some people are running Puppy as a recording studio, doing video editing, etc.

I thought that this topic had quietly gone away. When I made the original post I was experimenting with using Puppy as a main distro and as a result of input from this forum I forgot about fiddling with the swappiness (There was some info on studying the way Puppy works but it seems to have been deleted).
I've now got Slacko, Pupcrypt and Legacy dotted about the place.
In reply to the post by syg00 asking why I use Puppy, it's because I like Puppy and if you think about it, a distro designed to be fast on single core PCs with low RAM will fly on a higher spec machine.