Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 26 Dec 2001 13:17:27 -0600
From:      Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>
To:        Andrei Popov <ceesaxp@m-net.arbornet.org>
Cc:        Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Swap not used *at**all*
Message-ID:  <20011226131727.M91594@elvis.mu.org>
In-Reply-To: <20011226124857.A30355@m-net.arbornet.org>; from ceesaxp@m-net.arbornet.org on Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 12:48:58PM -0500
References:  <20011226091540.A70996@m-net.arbornet.org> <20011226151905.GA84869@dan.emsphone.com> <20011226124857.A30355@m-net.arbornet.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
* Andrei Popov <ceesaxp@m-net.arbornet.org> [011226 12:21] wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 26, 2001 at 09:19:05AM -0600, Dan Nelson wrote:
> > In the last episode (Dec 26), Andrei Popov said:
> > >=20
> > > Is this normal:
> > >=20
> > > andrei@vogon:~
> > > 2:05:49pm% swapinfo
> > > Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Type
> > > /dev/ad4s1b        525344        0   525344     0%    Interleaved
> > >=20
> > > This machine is running with 256MB RAM and a 512MB swap device.  Swap=
 usage
> > > is zero even when running X and postgress and aolserver with a running
> > > instance of OpenACS-4.
> >=20
> > Try this:=20
> >=20
> > dd if=3D/dev/zero of=3D/dev/null bs=3D192m count=3D1
> >=20
> > That should force some swapping :)
>=20
> It sure does :)
>=20
> But the question still remains -- is it not odd that there's no swapping
> when running X, nor is there one when running fairly expenm=7Fsive Postgr=
es
> selects et al?

No, the system tries pretty hard not to swap.  In fact swapping is
really a bad thing to have happen on a loaded machine as it can
result in a cascade failure.  If you look in the archives for
Matt Dillon's postings on "cascade failure" it will explain things
a lot better.

--=20
-Alfred Perlstein [alfred@freebsd.org]
'Instead of asking why a piece of software is using "1970s technology,"
 start asking why software is ignoring 30 years of accumulated wisdom.'
Tax deductable donations for FreeBSD: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20011226131727.M91594>