On Wednesday 27 April 2005 11:00, Ow Mun Heng wrote: > I've got a question regarding VM management in Linux. > > I've got 512MB of RAM on my laptop and at times it can still be slow esp > when the RAM is used up and starts accessing the swap. > > Setting swappiness to 10 doesn't really make a difference at all.
same here :( > > > On Linux, it seems that the opposite is true, when we hit swap, and then > the disk starts to thrash violently and I get slow load-up of programs > and even switching between virtual Desktops can be a real pain. it is some time ago, that I read it, so I might (very probable) very wrong: while smart OSes shove the data in big chunks into swap and out of it, Linux fetches every single 4k page in its own transfer. Yes, linux swap is totally, madly slow. When someone says 'swap is good, because I can have more things in memory, thus the box is slower' I laugh in his face - because it is simple not true. I have 512 mb too, and most of the time it is well enough, but sometimes (exspecially after BIGDOWNLOAD) swap starts to kick in - and from the first few kb on swap I always have the feeling, that always the WRONG stuff is swapped out. There is one workaround: swapoff -a && swapon -a and everything is fine for some hours more ... or more RAM, but I would like to see swap fixed - and the stupid behaviour that user data (like running KDE) is swapped, to make space for some totally unneeded buffering/caching, that does not go back to its 'normal' state. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
