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I have a 64-Bit Linux PC with 4 GB of RAM.

How can I find the optimum value of swappiness (/proc/sys/vm/swappiness) to be set? The default is 60 and I don't think it works best for everyone.

I am looking for an answer which possibly makes use of the outputs of the commands free, top, ps etc

I can always provide more system information if required.

Some info regarding swappiness can be found here

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Honestly, it depends what you're doing with this box. I suppose that if you are constantly chewing up RAM, you'll want to swap more (to keep RAM available), while if you are not using a lot of RAM, you'll want to swap less (to avoid HDD IO). Of course, I may have this backwards... – new123456 Jun 6 '11 at 5:12

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Leave it at its predefined value. The reason why it's set to this, is that it works for most workloads.

So your question should actually include the planned workload. As that's what swapping is about ;-).

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