Lone Sysadmin

Depends on your usage patterns. On 8GB I gave it (ZRAM) between 512MB to 768MB RAM, and later on just using whatever values for the relevant sysctls AntiX was using(or their scripts created dynamically during setup/startup) at the time. It isn't just vm.swappiness, there are others, and they changed, or got removed, and replaced by others, over the years. And all of them sort of interwoven, influencing each other via what's happening in vm-subsystem. Can have bad feedback loops if you do it wrong, and be counterproductive. So you have to experiment, and measure with different settings, for what you're running.

Where measure can be anything from htop/atop over https://github.com/cdown/psi-notify , to https://github.com/noiseonwires/memory-pressure and so on.

To understand what these sysctls are about, how they are related to each other, and to ZRAM, I'd recommend reading, or at least skimming https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html , https://chrisdown.name/2019/07/18/linux-memory-management-at-scale.html , https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-space , https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-almost-always-add-swap-part2-zram , https://linuxblog.io/linux-performance-no-swap-space , https://linuxblog.io/running-out-of-ram-linux-add-zram , https://github.com/ValveSoftware/SteamOS/issues/899 , https://lonesysadmin.net/2013/12/22/better-linux-disk-caching-performance-vm-dirty_ratio , https://github.com/CachyOS/CachyOS-Settings/pull/19 ,…

Formatting legacy stuff was always part of the deal, but at the same time, I was never interested in being able to host vim. Some people disagreed rather vocally.

One of the things I discovered was just how much legacy cruft is really around. Not just things like ANSI colors, but e.g. grotty syntax. It made no sense until I realized it was created for teletype printers... it underlines things by backspacing after every character and printing a "_". It bolds by backspacing and repeating the character. I had to parse this to support man pages, and I assume the default TTY still does too.

The other thing was that so much of Unix workflow really only works by accident. The fact that you can ssh + sudo + ssh + ... is because the pipes are too dumb to fuck it up. Take for example SSH escape sequences... [1] they only work on the first hop. The proper solution is out-of-band signaling.

From an architecture point of view, the whole termcaps / stdio thing is crazy. The Unix principle is supposed to be about simple agnostic composition, and yet most tools have to sniff out their environment in order to maintain this illusion. Text files are for people, not machines. And if you want to see a never ending discussion, just ask a bunch of greybeards how to write a shell script that can handle files with spaces in their name.

[1] http://lonesysadmin.net/2011/11/08/ssh-escape-sequences-aka-kill-dead-ssh-sessions/

The ACTUAL Heisenberg uncertainty principle does not have any effect on software, or on normal computer hardware such as cpus. The problem where an error goes away when you try to look for it is unrelated to any actual quantum effect. Bug analysts are only using the word 'Heisenberg' as a metaphor. It only confuses people. Please stick to 'observer effect' instead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(information_technology)

https://lonesysadmin.net/2010/01/05/heisenberg-monitoring/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

It's possible you were seeing another problem, but this issue is more likely to appear with a faster network connection, because the network transfer happens faster than the disk writes.

You can confirm by watching /proc/meminfo and watching the Dirty and Writeback numbers.

Changing up the vm.dirty* settings can help as described here:

https://lonesysadmin.net/2013/12/22/better-linux-disk-caching-performance-vm-dirty_ratio/