Adjust vm.swappiness to Avoid Unneeded Disk I/O
This is post #11 in my December 2013 series about Linux Virtual Machine Performance Tuning. For more, please see the tag “Linux VM Performance Tuning.” The Linux kernel has quite a number of tunable options in it. One of those is vm.swappiness, a parameter that helps guide the kernel in making decisions about memory. “vm” in this case means “virtual memory,” which doesn’t mean memory allocated by a hypervisor but refers to the addressing scheme the Linux kernel uses to handle memory. Even on a physical host you have “virtual memory” within the OS. Memory on a Linux box is used for a number of different things. One way it is used is internally for buffers for things like network …