On Thursday, 26 April 2018 10:47:52 AM AEST Daniel Jitnah via luv-main wrote:
Is swappiness setting in Linux what you are looking for?
How to change the Swappiness of your Linux system https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/linux-swappiness/
Thanks Daniel and James. I changed the swappiness of the system in question by putting vm.swappiness = 10 in /etc/sysctl.conf. Generally the performance seems better since doing that. However there are some downsides, after running for a while with a low value I've started seeing the following errors in the kernel message log when using mplayer while running kernel 4.16.0-1-amd64. When I play a 720p video (EG one downloaded from SBS on demand with youtube-dl) it works fine (although usually having that kernel error), but a FullHD video downloaded from YouTube causes extremely poor performance (hangs of a second every few seconds and jittering of the video) and is unusable. This isn't a total surprise, presumably the defaults were set for a reason and mplayer causes the X server to do some things that it doesn't do in other situations. Maybe I would have the same kernel issue if I tried 3D gaming, but I haven't done that much in recent times. I really need to get more RAM. [3175207.254191] radeon 0000:01:00.0: swiotlb buffer is full (sz: 2097152 bytes) [3175207.254196] radeon 0000:01:00.0: swiotlb: coherent allocation failed, size=2097152 [3175207.254199] CPU: 5 PID: 1199 Comm: Xorg Not tainted 4.16.0-1-amd64 #1 Debian 4.16.5-1 [3175207.254201] Hardware name: System manufacturer System Product Name/P8H61- M LE, BIOS 0703 06/22/2011 [3175207.254202] Call Trace: [3175207.254211] dump_stack+0x5c/0x85 [3175207.254215] swiotlb_alloc_coherent+0x19b/0x1b0 [3175207.254223] ttm_dma_pool_get_pages+0x235/0x620 [ttm] [3175207.254229] ttm_dma_populate+0x25e/0x350 [ttm] -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/