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Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on December 02, 2009 at 19:35 local (server) time

Lately, I've been unlocking my workstation in the morning, only to find that all my workspaces take several seconds to redraw, just like if the system had been swapped out with an 80286 processor.  This is due to too much swap usage, and the moving of unused pages out to disk.  Most likely, my corporate-managed Windows VM was doing a couple thousand virus scans during the night (argh, I hate it) and filling up the buffers and caches.  Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but it seems that something in Linux 2.6.30 has changed, recently, resulting in more page file usage.

Strangely, the /proc/sys/vm/swappiness variable (see discussion here) is still set to 60, which is the default.  I set it down to 0.  We'll see if this helps, tomorrow.

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