Why is CL using this bad settings for dirty memory?

Q&A
1

I have just installed Clear Linux (desktop live) and started to copy some big files back from my backup on an external USB HDD. To my not-so-pleasant surprise, I was unable to use my computer for the duration of the transfer.
So I started to investigate and found out that it is (mostly) due to the settings of dirty memory. After installation the files contained this:

/proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_bytes -> 0
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_bytes -> 0
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio -> 50
/proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio -> 5

First I solved the problem by lowering the ration to 1 in dirty_ratio but then I read this article and saw that the mighty Linus considered setting ratio values old-fashioned in 2013, and started wondering - why does the most progressive Linux distribution defaults to such settings?

Currently, I have set dirty_background_bytes to 8 MB, and dirty_bytes to 16 MB (and ratios to 0) which is probably a bit too low as the speed is slower but the difference in responsiveness is not noticeable from the ratios set to 1.

2

I’m actually doing some work on improving how users can tweak these settings. The values we set are determined experimentally and tuned for our target audience (e.g. cloud performance, hpc, etc) and may not necessarily be optimum for each and every installation.

I will hopefully post some updates that will allow you to tweak clr-power-tweaks in a consistent way easily in the next week or so, so you can apply whatever settings you want.

3

True, this is not a desktop oriented distro…yet. Anyway, hopefully this post will help someone. I haven’t realized that the settings could be useful on other installations. Thank you.