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I know this may sound absurd but my laptop has Xubuntu Saucy with 4GB RAM. I decreased swapiness from 60 to 7 but now applications take more time to launch and I see disk i/o before the application window appears. This is particularly the case for Thunar and the terminal. Before changing swapiness, the launch of such applications took no time.

Here are the lines in sysctl.conf:

vm.swappiness=6

vm.vfs_cache_pressure=50

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  • Are you sure the writes are also increased? The increased read I understand, as this is what you asked from the kernel, and if you are short on RAM (I think you are) the decrease of swappiness results in slower application startup as those apps are not in RAM anymore. Increased writes? I don't know how would be a result of this.
    – falconer
    Jan 18, 2014 at 14:03

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The effects of optimization are often difficult to judge. They can however be measured by benchmarking tools.

I would like to recommend for speed up the use of the zram tool which creates a small swap area in the ram and makes the use of programs much faster, the use of preload that logs the use of programs and makes the reading from the disk for the programs faster and finally tune swappiness so the system makes a lesser usage of swap.Also if you are in for some adventure you can optimize the file-system(ext-4, btrfs etc) by reading VERY CAREFULLY the documentation on each distro.All these do not make much of a difference in new systems, it is mostly for old hardware (2 years and more)

i think this may help you

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