swappiness. It “controls the relative weight given to swapping out of runtime memory, as opposed to dropping memory pages from the system page cache” [6]. Starting with Linux kernel releases 2.6 this value was introduced. It is stored in the file /proc/sys/vm/swappiness .

What is Linux swappiness?

Swappiness is a property for the Linux kernel that changes the balance between swapping out runtime memory, as opposed to dropping pages from the system page cache. Swappiness can be set to values between 0 and 100, inclusive. … The distress value is a measure of how much trouble the kernel is having freeing memory.

How do I view swappiness?

This can be checked by running the following command in a terminal: sudo cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. The swap tendency can have a value of 0 (fully off) to 100 (swap is constantly used).