Hi all,


to what extent the how to given here is accurate

http://www.ubuntu-unleashed.com/sear...piness%20tweak

will it give significant performance improvement ?

I don't think it is very accurate, nor is tweaking that feature likely to create a significant improvement.

It is NOT managing a trade off of use of the disk vs. use of RAM. It is managing a trade off of use of ram to reduce disk I/O to the swap file, vs. use of ram to reduce disk I/O to other files.

Usually the defaults are best and changing it will reduce performance.

Depending on how you use your Linux system, there may be an interesting trade off of responsiveness vs. performance. If you have a low priority program doing a lot of file I/O while a high priority program is idle waiting for user input or for network packets, the default settings will heavily use memory to speed up the low priority program, and may use so much that it makes the high priority program unresponsive (slow to come up to speed again after whatever it was waiting for happens).

In that case, lower swapiness could reduce total performance (slow down the low priority program far more than it speeds up the high priority program) but be a good thing because it improves responsiveness.

But most people don't run the mix of programs where even that trade off exists. Most of us have various non UI programs sitting around waiting for events that won't happen anytime soon. Meanwhile our UI programs are reading, writing and mapping various files. If you reduce swapiness, those non UI programs may consume ram they don't really need (instead of being kicked out to swap space where they belong) while the file I/O is slowed for the programs actually in use, reducing both performance and responsiveness.

Unfortunately, Linux (at least ordinary distributions) doesn't have direct priority controls on RAM use. Indirect controls (type of ram use rather than priority of ram use) at best let you shift ram use only sort of in the right direction, and then only when you have specific mixes of applications and a good understanding of how those applications might respond.

but the important thing is that there is no vm.swappiness entry in my

/etc/sysctl.conf file

the command cat /etc/sysctl.conf | grep vm.swappiness gave me nothing
should i add vm.swappiness to this file ?

"cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness"

when i gave this command i got o/p as 60, now how to change this value via sysctl.conf file ?