I see people discussing changing swappiness but what is the exact way to go about doing it and making it stick at every reboot? Also, I heard you can run swap from the microsd to get a more responsive device?

My phone comes down to a crawl after less then a day of usage. I normally have to repeatedly tap conversations for it to open after a minute so im looking at anything to improve the responsiveness. Thanks for your help!

swappiness?!?!?

are you referring to swap partition maybe?

what unstable stuff have you installed to your device?

Read this, there are some info about swappiness: http://kerneltrap.org/node/3000
I suppose Wikipedia also got some info on that subject.

Thanks for the link... I roughly know whats swappiness after using Andriod with custom ROM's for over a year. I just dont know how to set it on N900. And google isnt much too

I'd leave it be, it probably has already been optimized.

Yes, the problem lies somewhere else since slowing down to a crawl in a day isn't normal behavior.

Just echo a value to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness (as root). There doesn't appear to be sysctl on the N900, so persisting the changes would be a bit trickier.

It's /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. As root:
echo "50" > swappiness
will change it, though this won't survive a reboot.
The default is 100, which is the swappiest. You could try lowering it to, say, 50.

You can add a swap partition to your SD card by editing the partitions and adding a Linux swap partition to it (type 82).
For example, add a swap partition of 1GB to the SD. Search the internet for fdisk, swapon, swapoff and mkswap to teach you what to do. You'd turn the SD swap on and the internal swap off.

Please note: this is for information only. Do what you like with your device, but at the risk of making it not work at all. Personally I'd recommend keeping it set up as it is at the moment.

I updated my swappiness a couple months ago... I think I found a spot somewhere in the init scripts... if I recall correctly there was a comment saying to put updates to /proc stuff there... I think... I forget now and don't have the device handy.

I think it defaults to swapiness 100, which I think means "go ahead and swap as much as you want" ... which didn't seem right to me so I changed it to 0... not sure if I've noticed much difference... I should change it back again and see...

From what I've read, the sweet spot is 60... I just set mine to 60. Shall give it a try. Thanks for your help. And for anyone who wants to know the command is

echo 60 /proc/sys/vm/swappiness