From owner-freebsd-current Sun Apr 5 22:43:41 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id WAA24909 for freebsd-current-outgoing; Sun, 5 Apr 1998 22:43:41 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from wcc.wcc.net (wcc.wcc.net [208.6.232.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id WAA24890; Sun, 5 Apr 1998 22:43:37 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from piquan@wcc.wcc.net) Received: from detlev.UUCP (tnt13.wcc.net [208.10.139.13]) by wcc.wcc.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id AAA15380; Mon, 6 Apr 1998 00:39:09 -0500 (CDT) Received: (from joelh@localhost) by detlev.UUCP (8.8.8/8.8.8) id AAA02003; Mon, 6 Apr 1998 00:43:18 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from joelh) Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 00:43:18 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <199804060543.AAA02003@detlev.UUCP> To: dyson@FreeBSD.ORG CC: dswartz@druber.com, dg@root.com, dag-erli@ifi.uio.no, stable@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: <199804052135.QAA00680@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Re: swap-leak in 2.2.5 ? From: Joel Ray Holveck Reply-to: joelh@gnu.org References: <199804052135.QAA00680@dyson.iquest.net> Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >> My only quibble with this technique is that it would seem to make it >> harder to tell if your machine is really running low on swap or not >> (e.g. swap as backing store for stack/heap/whatever *is* critical and >> allocation failure can cause application failure, whereas swap being >> used to cache random cruft is in the "who really cares" department). >> Or is there some way to tell the difference? > It is difficult not only to tell if you are low on swap, but also it > is hard to quantify being low on memory. I have been thinking about > this over the last year or so. I don't know much about the FreeBSD VM system, but it is my understanding that in stock 4.4BSD, you can tell kinda by a high number of page outs but mostly by swap outs if you are low on RAM. Is this not the case also with FreeBSD? I've been considering writing a utility to watch several performance-related stats (including *why* pages are being paged out, and processes swapped out, etc), and watch whether MINFREE is being approached, or what have you. Has this already been done? Best, joelh -- Joel Ray Holveck - joelh@gnu.org - http://www.wp.com/piquan Fourth law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi sendmail: segmentation violation - core dumped To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message