[gentoo-user] Re: how to use RAM

[Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>]

On 10/12/2009 11:44 PM, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
>
> Greets, gentoo-users,
>
> as I ordered myself an upgrade from 4 to 8 gigs of RAM for my main
> workstation, just because it's rather cheap now and I have good use for
> the "old" 4 gigs I wonder what to do with those shiny new additional 4 gigs.
>
> OK, linux uses it for IO-caching, yep ...
>
> I have some ram-disk already for compiling stuff (portage-stuff) and I
> can think of increasing app-caches like operas own ram-cache to make use
> of the memory.
>
> I will give my virtual machines more RAM to improve their performance,
> yes, this is maybe the main reason for me to upgrade RAM.
>
> But are there any other things I might forget?
>
> Are there any creative non-ricer ways to really make use of it?
>
> I would like to hear your opinion on this, I am quite sure the
> gentoo-community knows one trick or the other ;-)

One thing I did after my RAM upgrade was to put:

   vm.swappiness = 30

in /etc/sysctl.conf to make the kernel use less swap.  (The default 
swappiness is 60.)  Don't use values lower than 20 though, and better 
don't disable swap completely; it's marginal, but complete absence of 
swap can hurt performance even with plenty of RAM.