Michal Hocko writes:
I am not really sure I agree here though. Swappiness has been traditionally more about workload because it has been believed that it is a preference of the workload whether the anonymous or disk based memory is more important. Whether this is a good interface is debatable of course but time has shown that it is extremely hard to tune.
Sure, it can theoretically be hardware- and workload-specific -- I don't think we disagree here. The reason I suggest it's a generally hardware-specific tunable rather than a workload-specific tunable is it's pretty rare to see anyone who's meaningfully used it for workload-specific tuning :-)
