Package: general Severity: wishlist I have been plagued by long delays with an unresponsive laptop, waiting for it to swap in Eclipse for several minutes at a time, several times per day. This is a Thinkpad T61 with 4 GB of RAM, squeeze/sid, X.org, KDE and Eclipse. (4 GB ought to be enough for everyone, right?)
Recently I got the advice [1] to set vm.swappiness to 0, rather than the default 60. This improved things dramatically. Apparently Eclipse is no longer being swapped out preemptively all the time. The difference in perceived responsiveness is spectacular. Shouldn't we provide a lower swappiness by default for desktop installs, at least those with a fair amount of RAM? This could improve the user experience on most modern desktop systems. Most users will probably never find out to tune this on their own. Ubuntu recommends a value of 10 for desktop systems [2, 3] (but ship with the default value). I realise that I don't have any solid evidence that this is a good move, maybe others can fill in with their experience. The goal here is to improve desktop responsiveness when multi-tasking, especially on machines with reasonably large RAM and one or more large applications. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2010/05/msg00313.html [2] <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq#What is swappiness and how do I change it?> [3] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5481/ -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.33.2-melech (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100512192226.234eaf...@better.bindows.net
