Linux Mint

[mickstv]

I installed LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) on a low spec computer the other day, which only had 2gb of ram installed. Anyway after running it for a while I noticed it was starting to slow up and the hard drive was working flat out. So I had a look in System Monitor and noticed the CPU was under 20% usage and ram was under 500mb used, but the Swap file was up to 200mb.

I did some investigating and found that you can adjust the swap usage, which is by default set to 60. The setting can be changed from 0 to 100, the bottom end maximizes ram usage before swapping to the hard drive, whereas a value of 100 will tell the kernel to aggressively move data out of the ram and into the swap file.

To change the setting just follow the info below.


1 Open terminal and install gedit

sudo apt-get install gedit


2 Whilst in terminal type

gksudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf


3 In the gedit text box that opens add the line below and save, then restart the computer.

vm.swappiness=5




Problem solved. Should be the same with all Ubuntu and Debian based Distro's