Rod Butcher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Sluggers, I have 1 gig ram and 4 gig Swap on a Sata drive... performance > when using memory-hogs like Sweep audio editor is great while it's using > ram, but slows to a crawl once it starts using swap... not just Sweep > but any app. Is this normal, or can I tune this in some way ? (I've > spent my hardware budget for the next 3 years so no more ram). > thanks
My laptop needs to use swap, and there is a noticeable difference in performance between different kernel versions as developers have directly or indirectly changed the behaviour of swap. There's a knob which you can play with in /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, there's probably other things you can tweak, too. If you like patching and compiling your own kernels, try the con kolivas tree, http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/. It's designed to improve responsiveness on desktops. I have no idea how it will go with your work load, though, it sounds like you need to swap, and no tuning or mucking around is going to have much effect. In my case, there isn't one application that needs loads of memory, just lots of applications that need a little, so the balance of the size of filesystem cache/buffers, and what, when and how much to swap something out has an effect. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
