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Date:      Sat, 10 May 1997 11:28:05 -0700 (PDT)
From:      The Devil Himself <fullermd@narcissus.ml.org>
To:        dkelly@hiwaay.net
Cc:        Troy Settle <rewt@i-Plus.net>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, Robert Withrow <witr@rwwa.com>
Subject:   Re: What swap for 1Gb memory? 
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96.970510112626.23154B-100000@narcissus.ml.org>
In-Reply-To: <199705092351.SAA08559@nexgen.hiwaay.net>

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On Fri, 9 May 1997 dkelly@hiwaay.net wrote:

> > >Somone was boasting (-;) about their 1Gb memory FreeBSD system. 
> > How
> > >much swap do you configure for such a system?
> > 
> > hmm... none?
> 
> That may not be wise. Back in the days of 2.0.5, or 2.1.0, I upgraded this 
> system from 16M w/ 32M swap to 48M RAM. Forgot to add swap. And it died in 
> "make world" when it ran out of core. Then I added my swap partition and 
> re-executed "make world" while watching memory use on another virtual 
> console with top. Never did see more than 400k or so swapped. Of course I 
> didn't sit there for hours (3 or 4 hours, back then, same system now takes 
> 7) and watch it altho the original failure happened fairly quickly.
> 
> I'd guess even a 1G RAM system would work best with a little swap, say 64M, 
> if for no other reason than to initialize the same virtual memory paths 
> everyone else has. But that's only superstitious guessing.

I know this is true with BSDi; I'm not sure about FreeBSD, but....
I've heard that it's important/necessary to have at least as much swap as
RAM, because if the kernel panics, it dumps a complete image of memory
into the swap space, to be recovered on reboot for examination, and it can
do bad thigs if there's not enough swap.
How bad, I don't know, but I don't think I'd want to find out...

> 
> --
> David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly@hiwaay.net
> =====================================================================
> The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its
> capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.

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