I think kswapd is a necessary evil and the system can hardly be prevented of swapping pages in and out. kswapd activity is generally a symptom of another problem.
I noticed that when kswapd runs for several seconds, it generates lot of IO and slows down the system drastically. It can be reproduced with dd and creating large files. The system slow down due IO load is also observed when apport writes a crash report. Is there a way to tune the filesystem and improve disk access? Secondly, when the system swaps heavily it means that some process is using lot of memory. I looked at the memory consumption and reported bug 1497924 for the memory usage of oxide and apps depending on it (webbrowser and webapps) Fixing it might improve the situation of memory consumption and reduce the activity of kswapd. Finally, setting swappiness to 1 *seems* to improve the situation a little bit but it's just an impression and I don't have numbers to prove if it's better one way or the other. Certainly the default of 100 has a negative impact on performance. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1496051 Title: kswapd pegging cpu To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1496051/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
