Hey everyone! I'm a Linux newbie with a 2012 MacBook Air that has just 4GB of RAM running Linux Mint. I'm trying to play a game that really pushes the laptop's limits. I discovered that setting my SWAP to 8GB and the Swappiness to 100 actually allows the game to load, albeit slowly. I'm curious: are these settings okay for daily tasks like web browsing? Is having Swappiness at 100 bad for regular usage? What settings can I tweak to strike a good balance?
2 Answers
Setting your Swappiness to 100 means the system will use swap space aggressively, which can slow down performance since swap is much slower than RAM, especially if you're using an SSD. If you're fine playing under those conditions, consider creating scripts to adjust your Swappiness dynamically or perform swapoff and swapon when needed.
You might want to try completely disabling swap and enabling ZRAM instead, which can improve performance by compressing data in RAM. It might be a better option for your setup.
I’ve just disabled SWAP and enabled zRAM, but I’m unsure about Swappiness—should I keep it at 100 now that I've made these changes?