Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

As has been stated several times in this thread, the "swappiness" factor is not about over-committing RAM. It's about giving the kernel the freedom to say, "Hey, these pages in RAM have not been used in a long, long time. I'll swap them to disk so I can use that RAM for things that will speed things up more, like disk caching."

This is independent of applications whose working set size exceed that of physical memory.



Yeah my reply was to the "disable swap" part of the discussion, not the swappiness one.


Disabling swap means setting swappiness to 0; I'm not sure how you can talk about "disabling swap" without talking about swappiness.


Because that depends on the kernel version, I took the more reliable approach of using 'swapoff -a' (or in fact not defining any swap in my /etc/fstab). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7940136


Which then means that you're not allowing the kernel to make such decisions as what I described. (Rarely used pages paged out to allow for more disk cache.)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: