Comment # 44 on bug 1159882 from Robert Delahunt

This is a problem because with default kernel VM settings and a swap, a 16GB
system using dd/gzip/rsync is heavily impacted.  For instance, I can connect my
external 1TB hard drive and (/home LUKS -> external 1TB LUKS) have 100MB or
higher swap utilization.  And that's the first command being run when the
system is booted.

Changing swappiness to 1 and VFS cache pressure to 200 doesn't eliminate
swapping.

System bogs very drastically, even with / being housed on a brand new 1TB
Kingston SSD.

I understand that maybe some of this is intrinsic to the older kernel plus the
brand new hardware, but still, I've never seen previous versions of OpenSUSE
dig so heavily into swap just backing up my stuff to my 1TB external, for
instance.

At some points the system lags so bad that the mouse slows and the system (for
all intents and purposes) behaves like it's locked up.  Getting to a virtual
terminal is possible, so the system isn't locked, but it drags down all of X
and XFCE with it.  (Which is noteworthy: user is not using a "larger" WM/DE
like KDE/Gnome/MATE.)

So it's basically every disk I/O.  For instance, I got a new MicroSD to put
college stuff on (Windows vs Linux, so that my college documents are "portable"
in case of a problem or in case I need to do work at school) and even putting
maybe 1GB of documents on that 64GB MicroSD caused the system to dig into swap.
 So it's literally every Disk I/O.

Running the original OpenSUSE LEAP 15.2 kernel with the swappiness and cache
pressure variables modified but without a swap alleviated half the issues, but
it still caused (when the system reached the end of RAM and had to "move things
around") the system to lag pretty bad.

These issues seem to be completely gone with the bleeding edge kernel.

Please consider this a serious issue.  Maybe on this fast a system, a user
would be willing to ignore it.  But it affects OpenSUSE as a whole in that
anyone who may be trying OpenSUSE but sees this behavior may just decide to
burn a different distribution to DVD and install something else.  Which may
affect their perception of SUSE Enterprise Linux as a result.

For me, I seriously had the thought to switch distributions.  And I've been
using OpenSUSE since at least 42.3.  Of course, I didn't, but still....

I can't tell you what to do, I would just beg you to consider this a serious
issue.