Nobody’s mentioning putting laptops into deep sleep where no battery power is being used.
I think the biggest reason that’s fallen out of favor is that normal sleep now works pretty well on most systems. It adds wear to your SSD to do that.
What do you mean by normal sleep and pretty well? My XPS isn’t that old and it drinks from battery while sleeping quite fast, 12h and 50% goes down.
My older Dell laptop only drains 1-2% per hour on normal sleep which is also not acceptable, I can’t leave it like that over the weekend.
Swap is super helpful if you’re running a web server on a 1GB RAM 2 CPU Linode instance!!
Be careful with that
I think some providers prevent full usage of a VPS in the ToS
I pay for the whole VPS, I use the whole VPS.
As an admin, I prefer no swap on prod machines because I’d rather have the oom killer kill a process that will automatically be brought back up or replaced than grind everything to a crawl swapping. A dead process can be restarted. A swapped to death server can be challenging to even get into.
EarlyOOM is great for keeping systems responsive. I can’t understand why the default memory management on many distros still seems to be “do everything possible to avoid automatic termination of processes even if that means the system becomes borderline unusable.” It makes for a terrible user experience, and most users are just going to restart the machine when it happens rather than try to struggle through a slide show to manually kill whatever’s causing the problem.
I was forced to enable swap because it I run out of RAM without swap then 95% of the time my laptop hard reboots. Adding a ton of swap fixed it.
My next issue is that sometimes it just hard-freezes. Zero warning, under no load, I can’t even move the mouse. Linux on the desktop!
Can you upgrade the ram? Ram is cheaper than it was
My next issue is that sometimes it just hard-freezes. Zero warning, under no load, I can’t even move the mouse. Linux on the desktop
You may want to consider fixing the system cache value.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/10/25/39
I use lower values than Linus suggested.
I added a userland OOM and now my browsers or slack dissapears and I’m confused for 5-10 secunds every time. sometimes my editor or one of the lsp servers.
cspell also leaks like crazy
Oh how do I do this? Can you choose what processes it kills first even if they’re not the worst offenders?
I had this issue with System 76 with Ubuntu (for work). It was infuriating.
What hardware did you use ?
Some Dell/Intel business laptop. Nothing exotic.
Mhm something doesn’t add up (well atleast on my system)
The kernel’s swappiness option (a sysctl parameter ranging from 0 to 100) controls how aggressively the kernel prefers to swap out pages. A lower value tells the kernel to avoid swapping whenever possible, while a higher value allows more proactive swapping. The default value is 60, and you can check it using:
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
In other words, a low value (e.g., 10) means that the system prefers to keep things in RAM as long as possible. On the contrary, a high value (e.g., 80 or 100) tells the kernel to start swapping earlier to free up more cache.
I have 64 Gigs of RAM (only 8 are used by endeavour OS at all time), No Swap Partition yet my swappiness is at 60?
Is something wrong, even though I don’t feel anything off, with my System O.o?
Are you me‽
I put 64GiB of RAM in my mini desktop just to never have to deal with swap paging. AMD with integrated GPU, so it immediately steals, like, 4GiB for graphics, but even so I think I’ve never seen it go past 50% usage.
I think 60 is just a default. That’s what mine says, too, and I have 0 swap allocated:
total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 59Gi 16Gi 2.1Gi 72Mi 41Gi 43Gi Swap: 0B 0B 0B
very nice :)
There’s no swap, so swappiness has no effect.
In some of my systems with a lot of RAM, I pre-cache as much as possible (DBs) and disable swap altogether.
Most people won’t notice a difference, especially if you are running on SSD. That said, swapping will kill that SSD a lot quicker.