Is it possible to change the percentage of swap usage? I know in other distros, you would edit the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness for temporary changes or /etc/sysctl.conf to permanently change the vm.swappiness value.
Is it the same with SUSE? I’m still running install so haven’t had a chance to investigate myself yet, but since my computer has so little RAM, I’ve often found that changing this value vastly improves performance and would like to do so in this distro as well, if possible.
i can’t directly answer your question, but i can say that the current
value in my /proc/sys/vm/swappiness is 60
but i see no vm.swappiness value in /etc/sysctl.conf
and, i don’t enough about it to try and see what happens!
so good luck, and maybe someone else has a better answer…
i’d recommend more RAM…
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DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
Be it ever so humble, there is no place like 127.0.0.1.
Cool, I think with your information, I have the answer I desire, so thank you for your reply! Once I get SUSE up and going, I’m going to check it out!!
good luck…let us know how you get on…
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DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [posted via NNTP w/openSUSE 10.3]
Be it ever so humble, there is no place like 127.0.0.1.
As far as I know, “percentage of swap usage” isn’t really what swappiness changes. Under swap pressure, it is a difficult decision exactly how aggressively you swap out.
The ‘ideal’ value of swappiness for your situation is probably dependant on both what you are doing and how much memory you have; certainly Ubuntu users seem very fond of decreasing their swappiness value somewhat, but there is also an argument from Andrew Morton, who should know, that this slows things down under some circumstances, so YMMV. But whatever feels ‘fastest’ for you…
Oh, and ‘faster’ and ‘slower’ are probably not the ideal choice of words; more and less responsive would probably have been better, at least as far as an end user is concerned.
…but since my computer has so little RAM…
Obviously, having a reasonable amount of RAM is better, so presumably there are good reasons that you aren’t upgrading. If you really can’t have a reasonable amount of RAM, I’m not sure that I would recommend KDE, which tends to need more RAM than some other user interfaces.
I’d think what you really want is
free
to show how much memory you are using.
If your /swap file is fully utilized you can create files to use as additional swap space.
man mkswap
man swapon
I’ve used it long ago BFP.
What I edit the swappiness for is better use of voice box and some other programs. To my understanding, I can use all of my system memory for [program] and the swap (hard drive ‘ram’) for another workspace where I have a text document. I like to edit this as it allow me to evaluate a program and take notes without swap interfering with my programs…and yes, I learned it from Ubuntu and wantd to see how openSUSE would react to that type of modification.