Swappiness

Definitions

1. A Linux kernel parameter (vm.swappiness) ranging from 0 to 200 that controls how aggressively the kernel moves inactive memory pages from RAM to swap space on disk. Lower values favor keeping data in RAM; higher values swap more readily to free physical memory.

   In plain English: A setting that tells Linux how eagerly it should move unused data from fast memory to the slower hard drive.

   Example: "We set swappiness to 10 on the database server so PostgreSQL's buffer cache doesn't get evicted to disk under memory pressure."

Related Terms

• Kernel Module
• Jemalloc
• Loadable Module
• Memory Arena
• Udev
• User Space
• Virtual Address Space
• X11
• Linux Kernel Community
• Linux Kernel Module