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Linux Mint was throttling my modern hardware by default — 3 changes fixed it completely
Quoting: Linux Mint was throttling my modern hardware by default — 3 changes fixed it completely —
When you switch back to a tab it often has to reload, and minimized apps can take a moment to wake up. You would observe this even if your system monitor shows gigabytes of free RAM. So even though memory is available, it feels like the operating system isn't using it.
The reason is tied to a kernel setting called swappiness. This is a number from 0 to 100 that controls how aggressively the device inactivates processes from RAM and moves them into your drive. On Linux Mint, the default is 60, which allows it to work on most devices, including underpowered notebooks. However, on more powerful devices with 8GB or more RAM, this means Linux Mint is shuffling things to swap long before it needs to.
The problem is latency, not throughput, so even a fast SSD doesn't fix it. In a benchmark, the difference between RAM responding in nanoseconds and NVMe responding in microseconds is invisible, but large enough to feel the tiny hesitation in apps returning to activity.