Increasing the default vm.max_map_count value

2024-04-07 - Robin Candau

The vm.max_map_count paramater will be increased from the default 65530 value to 1048576.

This change should help address performance, crash or start-up issues for a number of memory intensive applications, particularly for (but not limited to) some Windows games played through Wine/Steam Proton. Overall, end users should have a smoother experience out of the box with no expressed concerns about potential downsides in the related proposal on arch-dev-public mailing list.

This vm.max_map_count increase is introduced in the 2024.04.07-1 release of the filesystem package and will be effective right after the upgrade.

Before upgrading, in case you are already setting your own value for that parameter in a sysctl.d configuration file, either remove it (to switch to the new default value) or make sure your configuration file will be read with a higher priority than the /usr/lib/sysctl.d/10-arch.conf file (to supersede the new default value).

  • @RayOfSunlight
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    -32 months ago

    That’s nice, how can i so that if i can ask?

    • @[email protected]
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      112 months ago

      You can temporarily set it using sudo sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=1048576 . How to permanently set the value will vary depending on the distro. iirc on debian and fedora, you can create a file under /etc/sysctl.d/ directory with content vm.max_map_count=1048576