Reduce swapping to speed up your Ubuntu Linux
Posted by vntutor on May 31, 2007
Linux uses hard disk space called swap to write information it needs for accessing various temporary programs when system RAM is busy. Writing to hard drive is slower writing to RAM because the hard drive runs 100 times slower than RAM. Therefore, if your computer has much RAM (1G or more) why don’t you tell your kernel about that because this helps your kernel using swap less and RAM more to speed up your system. Now, I will let you know how to reduce the tendency for the kernel to use the swap file.
Step 1: see what is the current value for setting
sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
(It should give a number 60 here)
