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TL;DR; why Debian becomes slow after long duration low activity but Ubuntu doesn't (and how to fix it)?

I've been using Ubuntu for a long time (up to 16.04), recently I changed to Debian (8 for a couple of days and 9 now). One frustrating thing I have experienced with it is that, when I leave the system up for a day/night doing some low activity (network intensive) work, when I want to (interactively) use the system again, it is highly unresponsive (for quite a long time but eventually it reaches an usable state).

I don't believe it is a desktop environment thing because I experienced the same behavior with Gnome 3 and now in KDE.

I came across these threads:

And they blame the swappiness and the amount of RAM. However I've checked the swappiness in one of my machines running Ubuntu (16.04) and they have it set to 60 (same as the one with Debian) and have considerably less memory than this one too. Also, with the same hardware, running Ubuntu, I never experienced such behavior (and I have done "exactly" the same experience described before).

So...my question is, what do Ubuntu does different than Debian that may prevent the described behavior? Or it maybe has to do with the kernel version (Debian's 4.9.0-3-amd64 VS Ubuntu's 4.4.0-83-generic)?

As a reference, the hardware is a Samsung Ativ Book 8 (8 GB RAM).

Also, the processing being done during the low activity period is a Dropbox sync running inside a docker (and some status monitoring running inside the docker and printing to stdout every 2 min).

Matias SM
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  • Testing the 4.4.0-83-generic Ubuntu kernel under your current Debian stretch system would provide a very useful data point. Please try it if you can. – Ferenc Wágner Jul 20 '17 at 12:58
  • I'm not that experienced in sys admining Linux to feel confident enough to install a foreign kernel into my system, and some googling didn't give me an easy action plan. If you have some pointers I'm up for the test. Otherwise, I'll need some time to research and gain enough confidence that I won't screw my set up. – Matias SM Jul 21 '17 at 15:58

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