What you don't know is affecting your performance

Does your Linux-based virtualized hosting feel a little slow? Does it suffer from preemptive swapping? Here's a quick tip on getting some more performance out of your current setup. This is especially useful if you have a significant ratio of physical RAM to in-memory programs.

Swappiness

The Linux 2.6 kernel has a parameter called vm.swappiness that regulates the kernel's likelihood to swap memory to disk (e.g., to free up memory for disk/content caching, load other programs, etc). Valid values are between 0 and 100. On the current release of Ubuntu (Intrepid) this value has a default value of 60 that you can investigate with the following command:

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$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60

This value is generally fine, but if your physical memory is significantly higher than what you need it's worth investigating other choices.I personally find a pretty significant performance increase in Rails behavior with a value of 0; essentially telling the kernel to not swap anything out until it becomes absolutely necessary.

The value can be changed either with:

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$ sysctl vm.swappiness=0

or

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$ echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

A persistent lack of swappiness

If you restart the server, then your change will be lost. If you want the change to remain persistent across restarts you'll either need to create a script that calls one of these commands or edit /etc/sysctl.conf to specify the swappiness. As always, exercise caution playing with kernel parameters :-).

Swapping it back in

If you change vm.swappiness and want to force the kernel to swap everything back in you can temporarily disable the swap partition and then immediately re-enable it.

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$ swapon -s

Filename         Type      Size  Used  Priority
/dev/sda2         partition    524280 33948  -2

$ swapoff /dev/sda2
$ swapon /dev/sda2

If the machine doesn't have enough memory to accommodate the swap-in the command will fail with an error.

Let us know if this helps you out!

Curtis Miller

Managing Partner

Startup junkie, Rubyist and gamer. Loves to brainstorm about new ideas.