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/ Daniel. On Wed, 2018-04-25 at 22:46 +1000, Russell Coker via luv-main wrote:
# free -m total used free shared buff/cache ava ilable Mem: 7962 2212 498 533 5251 4942 Swap: 10719 1732 8986
The above is from my workstation. It's running KDE, Chrome, KTorrent, and not much else. My understanding of the above is that most RAM is being used for cache and it's quite likely that this achieves the goal of reducing the number of storage accesses.
The problem is that I don't want to reduce the number of storage accesses, I want to improve the performance of interactive tasks. Ktorrent is configured to only upload 60KB/s so a lack of caching of the torrents shouldn't prevent it from uploading at the maximum speed I permit. When large interactive programs like Chrome and Kmail get paged out it causes annoying delays when I want to perform what should be quick tasks like replying to a single message or viewing a single web page.
Any suggestions as to how to optimise for this use case? I already have swap on one of the fastest SSDs I own and don't feel like buying NVMe for this purpose or buying a system with more RAM, so software changes are required.
When replying please feel free to diverge from the topic. I think this is an area where most Linux users know less than they would like so randomly educational replies will be appreciated even if they don't help me with this problem.