This system was giving me hell with ZERO SWAP. Now it is fine, running without issues. SWAPFILE is critical for Manjaro I suppose, if you have only 4GB RAM.
vm.swapiness=10, RAM = 4096, SWAP = 8192, CACHE is about 1.2GB
Yes, the max memory is 8gb. Swap is nessasary if you are running anything but the low resource desktops. Had you installed LXQt, 4gb would be all you would likely need.
There was a very major update offered today in which my installation updated 420 packages.
After this update, my Manjaro installation is sluggish, slow, and cache has swelled by 50% , RAM being consumed is much more and SWAP is also not very efficient though it is working.
Manjaro is working, not freezing, but it’s just not up to the mark on my hardware after today’s update.
Ultimately the solution appears to be physical upgrade of RAM. In my hardware, the maximum allowed physical RAM is 8GB so I suppose I’ll have to switch to a lighter distro like LXQt when Manjaro KDE outgrows 8GB
Manjaro does not make a LXQt installer iso. Its my favorite desktop. But I do create a Manjaro LXQt spin, you can find them here. There was a large update this morning and the old spins are over a month old. I will be releasing SbK LXQt 22.0.0.1 within the next 24 hours or so.
If you can, change the HDD for an SSD. The performance improvement is impressive at startup, program loading, faster swap file… for me it is the most important thing in terms of performance. I’d rather an SSD instead of 4 GB RAM more.