vm.swappiness=1 - set swapiness to lowest setting - still useful? (swappiness-lowest)

[Patrick]

Let the kernel only swap if it is absolutely necessary.
Better not be set to zero:

• https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Performance_Tuning_Guide/s-memory-tunables.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swappiness
  vm.swappiness=1

My experience back then was that swapping to disk can make a system unnecessarily slow.

Does this (still) make sense?

Another package with just a single configuration file.

Whonix/swappiness-lowest

background:

consolidating Whonix packages

Originally published at: https://www.whonix.org/blog/consolidating-whonix-packages There have been some complaints, that there are too many Whonix packages. Specifically by people auditing or trying to understand Whonix better. I think here is some valid and some invalid criticism. Nowadays seemlingly almost everyone is overworked. Attention spawns are small. However, it should not be expected to be capable to get an overview about a linux distribution in 5 minutes. All I can do is ask to take 3…

[madaidan]

Even ignoring any performance changes, swap can be a security issue since it writes parts of memory to disk.

[Patrick]

If one can afford to run without any swap, if one can afford to buy enough RAM, assign enough RAM to host and VMs, and doesn’t require any swap then of course this is preferred.

However, swap cannot be avoided for all users in all cases, see swap - swap file - Whonix-Gateway freezing during apt-get dist-upgrade - encrypted swap-file-creator.

Therefore even if the suggestion to not use swap makes a lot sense an answer for this forum thread would still be desirable.

[Patrick]

Merged into security-misc now.