Change swappiness from 60 to 10 usefull?

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1

Hi to all,

my system has sufficient memory, i think. Total amount is 24 GB, used about 9 GB, chached about 14 GB and free about 1 GB. But also it has about 2 GB swap.
I read, that changing the value of swappiness from default 60 to 10 could increase preformance.
So my question is, would it be usefull in my case to change or not. What do you think?
Best regards Ralf.

2

I tested some swappiness values in the past, but I never felt the system more responsive (or a benchmark proving better performance).
Redhat provides some suggestions here:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Performance_Tuning_Guide/s-memory-tunables.html

3

@filippo_carletti thanks for answering.
I’m testing a value of 10 for the next time. For today i din’t notice is a big difference.

4

After testing a swappiness of 10 for a couple of day:
No more swap utilisation anymore. Swapusage remains at 0.
Memory used is 8 BG, cached is about 15 GB, Bufferd about 0,5 GB.
No performance difference noticeable in my case.
So if someone has enough memory and cares about swap, o.k. change it.
Otherwise leave it at default.
Just wanted to give a feedback,if some is interested.

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5

Hello everyone,

From what i read all around . Lowering swappiness has to do with SSD drives that cannot tolerate frequent writing and swapping and that these actions reduce the SSD lifetime.
Now if you have a mechanical HDD and RAM above 2GB, as i do , i think it does not make any significant and noticeable difference. Also i did not notice any difference in several other distros i have tested.

Cheers

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