And why do I want this? And if I want this, why is it not the default already? SSDs have been mainstream for ten years I guess, so shouldn’t any current Linux installer do the right thing by now?
Because the default is set for healthy performance. But users in actual reality don’t care for raw performance but want responsive systems. If you are opening a browser to pass time while some longer process runs in the background, you are less interested in that background process being done 10% faster than in your browser not being sluggish.
PS: Sidenote… Many recommendations are based on older kernels. Since 5.8 swappiness is not measured from 0 to 100, but 0 to 200. So the 60 default is already half of what it was many years ago.
I don’t think there is a better “default” because the default has to be the general setting everyone can live with. But that of course also means it’s not particularly good for any use case.
In general desktop users prefer lower values for snappy behavior when switching thorugh different apps (~10 often recommended). People mainly focusing on preformance of the primary running app prefer higher values (which may, depending on setup) include gamers.
Also there is zram/zswap now (basically compressed swap in memory instead of on disk) which is faster than tradittional swap.
But in the end you can only try out values and watch your systems behavior or run benchmarks to find the proper value for you personally,
And why do I want this? And if I want this, why is it not the default already? SSDs have been mainstream for ten years I guess, so shouldn’t any current Linux installer do the right thing by now?
Because the default is set for healthy performance. But users in actual reality don’t care for raw performance but want responsive systems. If you are opening a browser to pass time while some longer process runs in the background, you are less interested in that background process being done 10% faster than in your browser not being sluggish.
PS: Sidenote… Many recommendations are based on older kernels. Since 5.8 swappiness is not measured from 0 to 100, but 0 to 200. So the 60 default is already half of what it was many years ago.
is there a “better” default than 60 these days on newer kernels (I’m on 6.17.0-20 at the moment)?
I don’t think there is a better “default” because the default has to be the general setting everyone can live with. But that of course also means it’s not particularly good for any use case.
In general desktop users prefer lower values for snappy behavior when switching thorugh different apps (~10 often recommended). People mainly focusing on preformance of the primary running app prefer higher values (which may, depending on setup) include gamers.
Also there is zram/zswap now (basically compressed swap in memory instead of on disk) which is faster than tradittional swap.
But in the end you can only try out values and watch your systems behavior or run benchmarks to find the proper value for you personally,