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quellen

Member

From: Italy

Registered: 2014-05-24

Posts: 364

best swappiness for gaming

hi,
what is the best swappiness value I can set to play? I have 8GB of physical RAM but when I have to play some games (for example on the Switch emulator) I have to add an 8GB swapfile (on SSD) otherwise they don't work.
it is currently set to 15, but I noticed that sometimes when the physical ram runs out the game has some slowdown

Last edited by quellen (2024-01-07 13:15:37)

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sorry for my bad english

agapito

Member

From: Who cares.

Registered: 2008-11-13

Posts: 703

Re: best swappiness for gaming

The swappiness value does not matter too much. If you cannot buy more RAM, you should increase the size of the Swap file/partition.

Try to boot with "zswap.max_pool_percent=40" parameter and 16GB Swap partition. That should help.

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Excuse my poor English.

seth

Member

From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,048

Re: best swappiness for gaming

swappiness only controls whether you're dropping file caches or swap out anonymous pages (on-the-fly RAM that cannot be re-read from anywhere else)
lowering the swappiness would only help if you had plenty of inactive file caches in RAM, not if you're running OOM

If you're short on RAM, kill fat processes you don't need (browsers, swap your fat DE for a lean WM, …) or get more RAM - zswap will only help w/ compressable memory, not sure how much of that comprises your game.

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