What is swappiness and why should I change it?
swappiness is a value between 0 and 100 which controls the priority of your system using ram vs. swap. Making this change will greatly increase the performance of your Linux system (server and desktop).
A swappiness value of 0 means avoid swap as much as possible and only use ram.
A swappiness value of 100 means avoid ram as much as possible and only use swap.
By default most popular distros like CentOS, RHEL, Debian, Ubuntu and Mint are preset for a swappiness of 60.
How to I check the swappiness?
Run the following command to check the current swappiness value:
cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
To temporarily change it, execute the following command:
sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=10
To set the value permanently on the system, edit the following file:
nano /etc/sysctl.conf
And add the following line if it isn't there yet:
vm.swappiness=10
