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My Ubuntu 12.04 x64 on Dell XPS 15 with 8GB of RAM has been really sluggish.

After some searching I came across post about swappiness. I noticed that swappiness on my system was reported as 0 which means swapping should only start when memory is all used and yet is was actually acting much the same as when swappiness is 60.

I set swappiness to 10 using:

echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

and update /etc/sysctl.conf with:

vm.swappiness = 10

After rebooting I notice that swappiness is reported as 0 again with same sluggish performance. I ran echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and the performance improved remarkably.

I rebooted again and check swappiness, it was reported as 0 again. I executed sudo sysctl -p and could see the values from sysctl.conf take effect.

It seems that the value from /etc/sysctl.conf is ignored on boot.

I have a notebook with Ubuntu 12.04 32 bit and I also applied the same configuration. On the notebook the changes do take effect as expected and remain after a reboot.

Has anyone come across this kind of problem? How can I fix it?

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    Is there a swap partition? Do you have reasons, other then the sluggishness, to believe that it's been running out of RAM?
    – mikewhatever
    Jul 24, 2012 at 22:12
  • There is a swap partition and the system just start using it long before running out of memory. The swappiness parameter configures how soon the kernel should do it. With a value of 100 it start swapping aggressively immediately. With a value of 0 it should only start swapping once all RAM is used.
    – Corneil du Plessis
    Jul 25, 2012 at 6:15
  • The real problem is that a change to the configuration is ignored when the system boots. The second problem is that a value of 0 for swappiness seems to have the opposite effect.
    – Corneil du Plessis
    Jul 25, 2012 at 6:16
  • @CorneilduPlessis The reason for this is because kworker will get stuck in a loop searching for swap that does not exist. Change swappiness to 30 and see if you don't have better performance.
    – mchid
    Jun 20, 2014 at 5:35

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Try this:

Start a terminal emulator and run

cd /etc/sysctl.d/
echo "vm.swappiness = 10" | sudo tee 60-memory-management.conf
sudo chmod 644 60-memory-management.conf

Reboot and check if the new values are in use with:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness`
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  • I tried this and still end up with swappiness = 0 after reboot. sudo sysctl -p is only way that set swappiness to the correct value.
    – Corneil du Plessis
    Aug 27, 2012 at 20:28
  • @CorneilduPlessis I had the same issue. vm.swappiness was set in /etc/sysctl.conf; changing the value there solved the problem.
    – xofer
    Jul 31, 2014 at 19:47
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I just bung the following in my /etc/rc.local

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1 #Discourage swapping.

Basically, you can run this command: sudo sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1 at any time to change the swappiness.. cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness gives 1 after this.

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