Feizhou wrote on Tue, 06 Jun 2006 10:54:26 +0800:
Yeah but with that patch that changed the vm system behaviour, setting swappiness to 0 had ZERO effect. The kernel happily swapped out what data it could from programs that were running.
But you apparently need some additional environmental condition for this to happen. I see normal behavior as ever with my 4.3. After boot it slowly fills up memory until less than 50 MB is left. If the machine is scarce on memory it even gets almost to zero physical mem left. swap file usage stays at a few 100k. I don't have desktop machines, only servers. I suspect that the problematic behavior occurs only when you close applications. In that case it might swap the diskcache of the closed application out instead of keeping it in RAM. On a server this doesn't happen, you have your applications running continuously and no big memory eaters that don't run all the time - well there are exceptions, of course.
Kai