(I like having it in my daily driver, but it’s sad LFS had to drop support for a “lower level” init system)

It’s not lower-level, it’s just worse.

You’re not changing much when you’re changing distros

This needs to be a pinned comment on every distro-hopping post.

Sounds like you haven’t taken the time to properly design your environment.

Lots of home gamers just throw stuff together and just “hack things till they work”.

You need to step back and organize your shit. Develop a pattern, automate things, use source control, etc. Don’t just file follow the weirdly -opinionated setup instructions. Make it fit your standard.

basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions

That’s 99% of what most people do.

Neat.

Neat. That’s going nowhere. Less formatting than even markdown… Hey kids you like plain text files right?

The last thing I want to see when I clock out is another terminal screen.

I’m reacting to this mostly. Self-hosters are a bit of an obnoxious blend of people who want turnkey-but-not-Google solutions and people willing to learn how to do things. People whining about “having to use a terminal” are generally in the former category.

Then don’t self host?

…it answers from the attached KBs only. If the fact isn’t there, it tells you - explicitly - instead of winging it.

So you’ve made a FAQ with a LLM interface? I could see that potentially being useful for cooperate “let our bot answer your questions” tools.

But the usefulness of AI isn’t just in “tell me a fact”. Like what would your AI give for "what functions would I use in Python to convert a utf16 string to utf8? Would the answer need to be in the KB already?

You can just spin up VMs on any Linux distro. Running unraid as a desktop (or proxmox) is kinda ridiculous.

What are IO and Iotop?

Input / Output.

Reading and writing to disk, network, etc.

iotop shows will show applications writing and reading from disk. It’s going to likely be pretty sporadic.

What may be happening, and what others are suggesting, is that you’re running out of memory (8gig isn’t that much these days). When that happens the system starts writing memory to disk so it can free more. That’s what you see with the “swap” usage. You can see a bit more about your memory usage with free -m:

$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           64141       17077       24020        1981       30419       47063
Swap:          20479           0       20479

Using swap space isn’t necessarily bad. But reading/writing to it frequently can be a performance killer. You can monitor that with a command called vmstat:

$ vmstat -w 3
--procs-- -----------------------memory---------------------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----------cpu----------
   r    b         swpd         free         buff        cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs  us  sy  id  wa  st  gu
   1    0            0     24590136        70748     31066604    0    0   228   309 9959   18   8   1  91   0   0   0
   0    0            0     24595172        70748     31065076    0    0     0   119 3159 6677   2   1  98   0   0   0
   2    0            0     24607436        70748     31070316    0    0  2300    75 3147 6693   2   1  97   0   0   0
   0    0            0     24594892        70748     31070316    0    0     0   584 3417 5950   1   1  98   0   0   0

The columns to pay attention to there are under the ---swap-- header. si is “Swap In” and so is "Swap Out. Those are reads/writes to and from swap space. Seeing a little activity there is fine. It is typically pretty spikey. But if you’re seeing lots of numbers there then it could just indicate that you’re running low on memory and the OS needs to move things to and from disk frequently. While it’s moving things to and from the disk the application trying to use that memory has to wait.

How so, given that we immediately re-enable the same swap device right after so that it’s only off for a very brief moment? Let go :)

$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           64141       17213       24010        1984       30297       46927
Swap:          20479           0       20479

See that buff/cache column? That’s memory being used by the system for caching. Files you you open and access get cached into memory as do inodes, filesystem objects, etc. If you run a “find / -type f” twice in a row the second one will be significantly faster because the first run cached a lot of objects into memory.

By starving the system of memory all that will be flushed and you get more disk access doing things you’re actually trying to do. Whereas things sitting in swap are there because they aren’t currently needed.

By turning off swap and then back on again you’re just forcing the system to drop all that cache which it will then attempt to reclaim space for and push things back out to swap.

I don’t know what benefit you think you’ll gain in the process.

Turning off swap could make things much worse though. The system will have less memory for file caches.

I’d leave swap alone, just monitor for whether the system is paging frequently. “vmstat 3” should show if you’re writing to swap frequently.

Don’t run swapoff if everything in swap may not fit in RAM.

Wut?

Yes

It doesn’t matter what people “celebrate”

Yes it does - because that is the point of this post.

If the question is if these operating systems are “Linux”, then yes, they are.

That is not the question as was pointed out to you.

In a sandbox.

Well - Windows has always had poor “fork()” performance compared to Linux (Windows applications prefer threads). So running lots of small applications that do lots of forking will take a performance hit.

That’s more the fault of running software designed for Linux on Windows.