memavaild - Man Page

memavaild [OPTION]...

memavaild is a daemon that tries to keep amount of available memory to improve system responsiveness during heavy swapping.

Default behavior: the control groups specified in the config (user.slice and system.slice) are swapped out when MemAvailable is low by reducing memory.high (values change dynamically). memavaild tries to keep about 3% available memory.

Effects: tasks are performed at less I/O and memory pressure (and this may be detected by PSI metrics). At the same time, performance may be increased in tasks that requires heavy swapping, especially in I/O bound tasks. Using memavaild has no effect without swap space.

• Python (>= 3.3)
• systemd with unified cgroup hierarchy

• The documentation is terrible (no config keys description, for example);
• The ZFS ARC cache is memory-reclaimable, like the Linux buffer cache. However, in contrast to the buffer cache, it currently does not count to MemAvailable (see <https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/10255>). Don't use memavaild with ZFS;
• Seems like memavaild violates the second rule (https://systemd.io/CGROUP_DELEGATION/): memavaild manipulates the attributes of cgroups created by systemd (memavaild changes memory.high values).

To resore config file with default values execute

sudo cp /usr/share/memavaild/memavaild.conf /etc/memavaild.conf

Edit the config and restart the service.

Feel free to ask any questions and report bugs at <https://github.com/hakavlad/memavaild/issues>.

Written by Alexey Avramov <hakavlad@gmail.com>.

Homepage is <https://github.com/hakavlad/memavaild>.