Just a little heads up about something that kernel 2.6 users may not have noticed. When I installed the 2.6.5 kernel I was poking around '/proc' and noticed a file in '/proc/vm' called 'swappiness' (which had a value of 60). I had some idea about what it was for but there was no mention of it in the kernel docs. Later that day I was looking at http://kerneltrap.org and noticied this article:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/3000?PHPSESSID=d5c5223a98199bf350e69d77c36ca...

It says 'swappiness' can be set between 0 and 100 (0 = no swapping, 100 = lotsa swapping) and mentions some recent discussions on the kernel mailing list about what 'swappiness' setting is ideal (i.e., don't swap anything to disk or swap everything to disk or some middle ground). The kernel maintainer, Andrew Morton, sets it 100 to free up as much memory as possible, while others think that desktop users don't want a delay when switching back to their apps so 'swappiness' should be closer to 0. I have it set at 25 now and it seems to work well (with 320 MB RAM) for everyday desktop use.

Just for completeness, if you want to set the 'swappiness' value use:

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=x [ 'x' being a value from 0-100 ]

And put:

vm.swappiness=x

in '/etc/sysclt.conf' (or wherever 'sysctl.conf' is on you machine) to keep that value on reboot.

That's all for now.

Jeff Green