so far so good, copying a 1.2gb file from mydocs to mydocs and system is still perfectly usable. Will try to stress it more tomorrow. Thanks

I was thinking the same thing. Also, while we're on the subject, has anyone tried testing if the noop I/O scheduler improves things?

Noop scheduler is activated by default and also u can't change a thing.

I'm not even in this thread and you're calling me out? Seriously? "Your tool" is cobbled together scripts. Your tool uses libraries that OTHER people wrote and you give no credit.

You can drop free caches however AFAIK you'll notice higher load and RAM usage because there are no more caches. When a process needs memory dirty caches are dropped. Best to let the kernel handle what it does best?

I've off-loaded swap to my microSD. There's a noticeable decrease in IO "collision" and my device is much more responsive during those times.

Im with hawaii on this one, this epitaph guy seems a bigger tool then his tool.
A bit insecure too.

Offloading to SD card makes sense - wouldn't that mean hotswapping is only possible between SD cards with swap partitions already written into them? If so, perhaps a swap-enabling script is in order - check for x bytes of space free on card, run one of the partition resizing/making programs to shrink the partition containing the free space, then create your swap one. Then mount the entire thing.

One or two more scripts and you could probably make it capable of dumping between the on-device swap partition (assuming you leave it there) and the SD-card ones... Would be a pain in the ***, but seems doable enough, at least in theory.

As for hawaii and trolling - he's not a troll. He's just sometimes quite hostile when it comes to newbs. Which is okay, most of the time. Also, see that "Know Nokia" link in his signature? You know, the one he runs? The one where the swappolube mods were born from, the one where he shows how to enable locked wifi frequencies, etc? Know that pwnitter app in the repos? He kinda made that too, if I recall correctly. He's also ported NetDiscover onto the N900 I believe, and has posted quite a lot of useful advice on here while he's been around.

Just because he doesn't regularly sugar-coat his opinions doesn't mean he's a troll.

Now, onto productive things: So I tested this with just the two queue changes - immediately attempting to download the Stellarium catalogue I was trying to download worked faster (I had given up after multiple attempts, and decided to see if your changes would make it better. Seems that they actually did).

So far, I'm leaving swappiness at 20 (I left it there a while ago, don't really significantly notice the difference between 30 and 20, but meh), and within a little bit I'll also see what effect dropping the dirty ratios will have. For now they're at the very high swappolube values.

Hawaii: About the drop caches - I know how it's used, I believe - echo 1 to it to make the caches get emptied, but then it continues caching as normal, from what I know. But would it get rid of the stuff mentioned earlier - the stuff that gets used in bootup and then doesn't get touched? If so, then it should be reasonably harmless to drop caches once late in the boot process, and then let things go naturally from there, to clean out all the unneeded after boot stuff, correct, as I understand it, and running it only once should prevent the higher loads later on, right?

Be darned interested to know that myself. I am doing some other stuff with my phone at the moment but will try and give that a shot after. If you try it in the meanwhile - can you post an update here as well.

The other thing I am wondering is performance of E.D could that possibly be improved by improved IO?

I plead guilty to not knowing much about this stuff nor how much IO E.D does.

It's not a question of cache pollution during bootup; none of that will survive long. It's that many programs/scripts (ie. bash and init) fork off the rest of the system and need to survive. And, programs are almost always completely loaded into memory and never free()'d, even though much of the code may never be called again after startup (ie. Xorg's config reading code).

What are disadvantages of using microSD as swap memory? What happens if back cover is removed intentionally or by accident during heavy swapping?

well, it should be slower memory, so there might not be any increase in performance, or it might even be slower. It could reduce the life of the SD card. Partitioning it is a pain, you probably have to wipe it clean. I read the whole thread on that and I didn't see what happens when you force it to unmount...