Setting the vm.swappiness Linux Kernel Parameter

The Linux kernel parameter, vm.swappiness, is a value from 0-100 that controls the swapping of application data (as anonymous pages) from physical memory to virtual memory on disk. You can set the value of the vm.swappiness parameter for minimum swapping.

The higher the parameter value, the more aggressively inactive processes are swapped out from physical memory. The lower the value, the less they are swapped, forcing filesystem buffers to be emptied.

On most systems, vm.swappiness is set to 60 by default. This is not suitable for Hadoop clusters because processes are sometimes swapped even when enough memory is available. This can cause lengthy garbage collection pauses for important system daemons, affecting stability and performance.

Cloudera recommends that you set vm.swappiness to a value between 1 and 10, preferably 1, for minimum swapping on systems where the RHEL kernel is 2.6.32-642.el6 or higher.

To view your current setting for vm.swappiness, run:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

To set vm.swappiness to 1, run:

sudo sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1

Swap space allocation

Cloudera recommends following the guidelines provided by your operating system vendor to configure the swap space on each host. If your vendor recommends a swap space range, then use the lowest recommended value.