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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    -338 months ago

    Bruh, i wish other distributions could also improve on that matter, i’m not gonna go to Arch, nobody is nice in there and not to mention the kind of show-offs they probably are

    • @aksdb
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      318 months ago

      It’s just a config. You can adjust that on whatever distro you are.

      • @RayOfSunlight
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        -38 months ago

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

        • @[email protected]
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          118 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

    • RayJW
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      58 months ago

      Pop!_OS, Fedora, and I think Ubuntu as well have already done this change long ago in this sequence. So no need to switch to Arch. Also, you can edit this manually, it’s just about changing the default.

      • @RayOfSunlight
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        -28 months ago

        Not going with any.

        Ubuntu is Cannonical, and Cannonical doesn’t do good.

        Pop! OS it’s just not my jam, sorry about that, i don’t meet the requirements to try that distro on a virtual machine.