From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Nov 3 10: 9: 7 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (fedde.littleton.co.us [216.17.174.44]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BD92F14D86 for ; Wed, 3 Nov 1999 10:09:03 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cfedde@fedde.littleton.co.us) Received: from fedde.littleton.co.us (localhost.fedde.littleton.co.us [127.0.0.1]) by fedde.littleton.co.us (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id LAA98299; Wed, 3 Nov 1999 11:06:34 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <199911031806.LAA98299@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: Jonathon McKitrick Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Chris Fedde Subject: Re: swap space... In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 03 Nov 1999 14:27:31 GMT." Date: Wed, 03 Nov 1999 11:06:33 -0700 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jonathon McKitrick writes: +--------------- | So TOO much swap space can be a bad thing? I just saw a comment saying | too much space will allow the OS to swap everything to disk and reduce | performance. | | -jonathon +--------------- Too much swap allocated wastes disk space that could be used for something else. But there are valid reasons why you might want to configure lots of swap. One is that you are using the mfs for /tmp and want to store big files there. If swap is large then big files and old files will tend to be in the backing store rather than in memory. You will not generally have a performance hit from just allocating too much swap. And using to much swap is also not always an indication of a problem ether. The big indicator is the 'page out rate' and the 'scan rate' reported by vmstat(8). These indicate how often memory pages are moved to backing store and dirty pages are cleaned for re-use. chris __ Chris Fedde 303 773 9134 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message