Linux Lite Forums

Would those of us who use LL2.2 benefit at all from reducing the swappiness ?

I ask only because it was a recommended thing to do in ubuntu 14.04

Depends on the gear



I run no swap on SSD out of personal preference.

I found this article interesting on the subject of swappiness.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/...by-default

I'm curious why swap partitions are recommended instead of swapfiles?
I use one 4 GB swapfile that lives on my data partition for all my OS's.

Am I being a silly billy?

@ ukbrian

I still class my self as new to Linux March/April this year when I really took the plunge.
If you ask 10 "guru's" you will probably get 10 different answers to the "Best" set-up.?

I can only give you my take on it, but it depends on a few initial factors:
1. What Hardware you currently have, unless you are willing to upgrade, or are building a new PC
2. What are you going to be doing, Day to Day just general stuff, Development work, Production Desktops/Servers

From this, and from what I have read/found there are a myriad of different configuration/set-up options.

So going to the original post on "swappiness", from what I have picked up(read)
Changing this value is only useful if you have a reasonable amount of memory 4GB+
It means you will use "faster memory", instead of potentially "slower" disk access for swap activity.
But with the caveat of point "2" above, in some case you may see no noticeable improvements.

To your point on "swapfile", Again, it is a combination of points "1 & 2" above.
If you have a small amount of memory, a swapfile can be useful for certain uses, and also if you want to "Hibernate"
Should it be a on a separate partition.??, back to point "1 & 2",
I have seen some recommendations where they have 7 or 8 different types of partition spread across multiple drives

Also, but not actually done/tried it yet.?,
having a separate /swap partition means you can share it in a multi boot set-up and save some disk space,

For me, I have come to a balance of 4 partitions:[size=1em] /root , /home , /data , /swap [/size]
I can easily just back my /data or my /home and hopefully keep upgrades simpler.?
But it needs a bit of config & set-up after installs

One thing I have read and seen, but I'm still not clear if it it's done by default/automatically, and not obvious.??
If you have a reasonable amount of memory 4GB+ is moving the "temp & tmp" from disk to memory via "fstab" at start-up

Bottom line, I don't think there is one size fits all,
But maybe there are some set-up's and configs that make the most of what you have..??

Dave