How to set swappiness?

[Rob1n]

Originally Posted by TheSacredSoul

From what I've read, the sweet spot is 60... I just set mine to 60. Shall give it a try. Thanks for your help. And for anyone who wants to know the command is

echo 60 /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The sweet spot will be very much dependent on the ratio between the memory performance and the media performance. That will be drastically different on a standard desktop PC (with very high-speed RAM and pretty slow hard drive media) than on the N900 (with slower RAM and higher-speed flash memory media).

And you've missed the critical '>' in the command you've given there.

[TheSacredSoul]

Thank you Rob1n. My bad. How do you type > using the n900 keyboard?

[Rob1n]

Originally Posted by TheSacredSoul

Thank you Rob1n. My bad. How do you type > using the n900 keyboard?

It's in the symbols table - press the blue arrow, then the Sym/Ctrl key above it, then select '>' from the pop-up symbols table.

[TheSacredSoul]

Thank you once again. You are a live saver. So just to confirm...


echo 60 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

[Rob1n]

Originally Posted by TheSacredSoul

Thank you once again. You are a live saver. So just to confirm...


echo 60 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

Yep, that's it. You can check the current value by running:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

[TheSacredSoul]

Yep it's 60 Thank you!

[Venemo]

Could you tell us how much better does it perform with the new value after some use?

[pycage]

I have been running my N900 with swappiness 30 for some weeks without any ill side-effect. But it seems that battery-life and device responsiveness have both noticably improved.

BTW, on Diablo OS, the default swappiness value was 1. I'm almost certain that a default value of 100 on the N900 is not the optimal setting for this device at all.

[Venemo]

Thanks Pycage!
Do you know how to set it so the value will persist after reboot?

[@SR]

On n900 default value for swappiness is set by /etc/init.d/rcS script somewhere in the last lines.
echo value > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness works until the next reboot. So if you want to change the value permanently you should edit it in rcS script.