[maemo-users] Dealing with N900 responsiveness (or lack of thereof)

[From: Dawid Lorenz]

On 22 February 2010 16:43, Dawid Lorenz <adl at adl.pl> wrote:

>
> Other thing I've noticed is system swappiness value, which is 100 by
> default. What I've learned [2] is that 100 value favours moving stuff to
> swap space quite frequently, which makes some sort of sense with
> experience I've got. I have rebooted my N900 today and set swappiness value
> to 60 by *echo 60 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness*, however I am not sure
> whether that's right way of setting this (article refers to
> /etc/sysctl.conf file which simply doesn't exists in my rootfs, or perhaps
> is stored elsewhere). Anyway, I am going to observe how system overall
> performance evolves over next couple of days.


I'd like to follow-up on this a little. Basically, after nearly two months
since launching this thread and moving my N900 into much lower swappiness
value (I currently have 30), frankly I can't see much difference. What
usually happens is that after few days of overall performance gets horribly
undermined, probably due to more and more things getting into swap space.
Sometimes I struggle to take a call, just because screen doesn't really
catch up on time. Utterly frustrating, so in order to remain sane, I simply
have to reboot the device, just in order to "refresh" memory. Not very
convenient.

Anyway, I've seen a suggestion on one of the blogs [1] that there's a
possibility to force certain applications to run with very low nice level,
which allegedly should make them h(sn-)appier. The comment poster also
suggests the possibility of making some processes never get into swap space.
Unfortunately I didn't hear from him, so I don't know the details, hence
asking here - is that possible at all? Anyone here tried that kind of tricks
and could shed some light on the case? Well, any suggestions in regards to
coping with not-that-excellent N900 performance are more than welcome.
Thanks!


[1]
http://danielwould.wordpress.com/2010/04/02/why-my-next-smartphone-will-probably-be-running-android-confessions-of-a-nokia-fanboy/#comment-422

-- 
Dawid 'evad' Lorenz * http://adl.pl

null://google 'no evil' mail has taken away my random signatures
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