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by bruce_one
3081 days ago
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Setting the `swappiness` value might be of use to you. Setting a lower value (min is 0, default is 60 iirc, max is 100, so above half) reduces the likelihood of the kernel swapping. The lower the number the fuller ram needs to be before the kernel will start swapping. Hence a low number will mean that less swapping will happen, hence meaning less SSD wear. |
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Along with a hard limit set by cgroups so that browser tabs start being killed in order to stop the swap from being overwhelmed when memory is being used well beyond its capacity.
(I'd be interested to know if 'swappiness' already effectively implements the following system-wide, but here goes.)
Now that I think of it, it's not so much the quantity of disk storage being consumed by swap, so much as the number of write / delete transactions. One thus wonders if an approach in which the browser somehow favors a small number of tabs to keep in ram, and then dumps the state of the remaining tabs to disk, might be just as effective, but without worrying about the growth of swap. Then, when the user opens a tab that had been saved to disk, if we crudely assume that the memory consumed by open tabs are roughly comparable in memory use, then we can take care of the whole affair of 'swapping' in a single exchange between memory and disk, where we dump the state of the in-memory tab in order to make way for restoring the saved one.
(Or did I just reinvent what swappiness does already? From your description of swappiness, I'm inclined to guess the answer is no. This approach strikes me more akin to using the swapfile as a filesystem, and keeping just a small number of tabs paged into RAM.)