Martin Reissner wrote: > Hello, > > ever since upgrading machines to Buster the vm.swappiness sysctl > parameter doesn't seem to do anything anymore and regardless on how I > set it via sysctl or directly in /proc the system behaves as it would > have a pretty high swappiness and thus is swapping out quite a bit under > load, using the memory mostly for buff/cache. > > To make this clear, I'm seeing no performance degradation and there is > not much swapping in done, I'm merely wondering why this behaviour has > changed and if there's a way to make it work as before again. Also I'd > be happy to know if anybody else is experiencing this as Buster has been > out for a while now and I found some information on this ie. other users > reporting the same issue, but not really a lot. > > Now if you're asking why I would configure swap if I don't want it to be > used, the answer is monitoring and failsafe. I usually set the > swappiness to 1 so to only swap if the box runs out of memory and then > trigger an alarm to let us know something is up. This is much more > convenient than the oomkiller striking down a mysqld process just > because it was allowed to use a bit too much memory.
i haven't noticed any issues with my desktop system set to 5, but i rarely if ever get much swapping going on anyways. i'm not using buster but using testing. if you are running a database oriented server i think the recommendation would be to set it to 0 or 1. songbird
