5.5. Tuning Virtual Memory Virtual memory is typically consumed by processes, file system caches, and the kernel. Virtual memory utilization depends on a number of factors, which can be affected by the following parameters. swappiness A value from 0 to 100 which controls the degree to which the system favors anonymous memory or the page cache. A high value improves file-system performance, while aggressively swapping less active processes out of physical memory. A low value avoids swapping processes out of memory, which usually decreases latency, at the cost of I/O performance. The default value is 60. Warning Since RHEL 6.4, setting swappiness=0 more aggressively avoids swapping out, which increases the risk of OOM killing under strong memory and I/O pressure. A low swappiness value is recommended for database workloads. For example, for Oracle databases, Red Hat recommends a swappiness value of 10 . min_free_kbytes The minimum number of kilobytes to keep free across the system. This value is used to compute a watermark value for each low memory zone, which are then assigned a number of reserved free pages proportional to their size. Warning Be cautious when setting this parameter, as both too-low and too-high values can be damaging and break your system. Setting min_free_kbytes too low prevents the system from reclaiming memory. This can result in system hangs and OOM-killing multiple processes. However, setting this parameter to a value that is too high (5-10% of total system memory) will cause your system to become out-of-memory immediately. Linux is designed to use all available RAM to cache file system data. Setting a high min_free_kbytes value results in the system spending too much time reclaiming memory. dirty_ratio Defines a percentage value. Writeout of dirty data begins (via pdflush ) when dirty data comprises this percentage of total system memory. The default value is 20 . Red Hat recommends a slightly lower value of 15 for database workloads. dirty_background_ratio Defines a percentage value. Writeout of dirty data begins in the background (via pdflush ) when dirty data comprises this percentage of total memory. The default value is 10 . For database workloads, Red Hat recommends a lower value of 3 . dirty_expire_centisecs Specifies the number of centiseconds (hundredths of a second) dirty data remains in the page cache before it is eligible to be written back to disk. Red Hat does not recommend tuning this parameter. dirty_writeback_centisecs Specifies the length of the interval between kernel flusher threads waking and writing eligible data to disk, in centiseconds (hundredths of a second). Setting this to 0 disables periodic write behavior. Red Hat does not recommend tuning this parameter. drop_caches Setting this value to 1 , 2 , or 3 causes the kernel to drop various combinations of page cache and slab cache. 1 The system invalidates and frees all page cache memory. 2 The system frees all unused slab cache memory. 3 The system frees all page cache and slab cache memory. This is a non-destructive operation. Since dirty objects cannot be freed, running sync before setting this parameter's value is recommended. Important Using the drop_caches to free memory is not recommended in a production environment. To set these values temporarily during tuning, echo the desired value to the appropriate file in the proc file system. For example, to set swappiness temporarily to 50 , run: To set this value persistently, you will need to use the sysctl command. For further information, refer to the Deployment Guide , available from http://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/ .

Commands:
vm.swappiness=10
echo 50 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness