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From: "Andrew V. Stesin" <stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua>
Message-Id: <199602011557.RAA17767@office.elvisti.kiev.ua>
Subject: Re: Good news -- pipe stuff
To: toor@dyson.iquest.net (John S. Dyson)
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 17:57:28 +0200 (EET)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199602010245.CAA02109@dyson.iquest.net> from "John S. Dyson" at Feb 1, 96 02:45:03 am
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Hello John,

# Rules of thumb like 2x or 3x kind-of don't really model what is happening.
# A better model would be "sum up the size of all of the programs that you
# are running (including malloc areas, etc)".  If that is bigger 2X the
# amount of memory that you are using, then that is how much swap space you
# need, otherwise 2X memory is a good bet. 

	Who can say apriory what programs and how many of them
	you'll be running tomorrow? Today your'e Ok, tomorrow
	you suddenly get some 15 sendmails running on the queue,
	and several uuxqts, and so on, so on.

	And I'm not really sure that running out of swap is safe at all;
	and probably there _is_ some empiric ratio between RAM and
	swap, which keeps system alive and response time low,
	back in 1.1* days heavy swapping on slow disks just stopped
	the system; with new FreeBSD things are _much_ better,
	and new disks are much faster (compare today's 2.5-5.0Mb/sec
	on new SCSI drives and 0.7-1.0Mb/sec on old IDE!).
	Swapping doesn't hurt any more. This is a Small Wonder and
	a Great Victory of both Mr. Dyson and HDD industry, really! :-)

	And more RAM might be added someday. Why save some 32Mb of disk
	today if you'll maybe insert 16Mb more RAM next month?

# 
# John
# 


-- 

	With best regards -- Andrew Stesin.

	+380 (44) 2760188	+380 (44) 2713457	+380 (44) 2713560

	"You may delegate authority, but not responsibility."
					Frank's Management Rule #1.