From owner-freebsd-questions Wed May 23 21: 2:26 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from co3021625-a.mckinn1.vic.optushome.com.au (co3021625-a.mckinn1.vic.optushome.com.au [203.164.19.232]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BD69537B423 for ; Wed, 23 May 2001 21:02:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from simon@synatech.com.au) Received: by co3021625-a.mckinn1.vic.optushome.com.au (Postfix, from userid 1001) id B5F88F215; Thu, 24 May 2001 14:02:17 +1000 (EST) Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 14:02:17 +1000 From: Simon Lai To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RSS=245Mb with 256MB of RAM? Message-ID: <20010524140217.A2621@pobox.com.> Reply-To: simon@synatech.com.au Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi, I am running 4.3-RELEASE on a machine that is dedicated to running a simulation program. No other users use this machine. Its tasks are to compile and run a simulation that has a large tree. The path taken down the tree is governed by some data and is generally random in nature. The size of the simulation process tops out at around 245 MB, but the system starts swapping before the RSS gets that far. I should add that every 5-10 minutes the sim writes out 2.5Gb of data, to a sequential file on disk. Physical RAM is 256MB. I seek any asistance in tuning this machine so that I can run a 245 MB process without swapping. To reduce system memory usage I have - 1. Killed off all unnecessary services. Besides the kernel processes, the only things running are gettys, portmap inetd, adjkerntz, syslog and cron. 2. Eliminated all unused device drivers in the kernel, and removed NFS, CD file systems etc ... maxusers is set to 3. I notice that top shows a 35M buffer - can I constrain this somehow? Also the 38M Wired figure, obviously the buffers are part of this, what about the remaining 3M? I have turned on the H flag in /etc/malloc.conf - how does this help? All suggestions appreciated. regs simon ps. FreeBSD is rock solid - this machine often swaps for hours when unattended but it has never crashed. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message