Arch Linux

wuischke

Member

From: Suisse Romande

Registered: 2007-01-06

Posts: 630

High swap usage and multi-tasking

While trying to build GF (PKGBUILD) I experienced a very high memory usage (about 2 GB peak), which lead to enormeous swapping. (I have 1 GB RAM and 2GB swap; I added an additional 2GB swap to see if this would improve the situation).

My system became unusable, although I reniced the culpable process to 15 already and tried a swappiness of 0 as well as of 100.

Is there any way to "reserve" some memory for the system and applications like X, opera, geany, pidgin terminals which I need for my work while executing the memory intensive task in the background with minimal impact on my system?