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Date:      Wed, 2 Aug 1995 10:55:34 -0700 (PDT)
From:      John Dyson <dyson>
To:        apollo@io.org (Andrew Herdman)
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject:   Re: 2.0.5 Eager to go into swap
Message-ID:  <199508021755.KAA19004@freefall.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.91.950802132307.17748A-100000@trepan.io.org> from "Andrew Herdman" at Aug 2, 95 01:29:02 pm

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> 
> I have a 486dx2/66 with 32 Megs of ram, and a 32 meg swap partition.  
> When I was using 2.0 (CD) i rarely ever went into swap.  I could make a 
> port, and run netscape under X and still not hit swap.  
> 
> Now with 2.0.5, it seems very eager to start swaping.  In fact, with the 
> above, it goes into 45% or more swap.  This sucks to say the least.  My 
> machine is trashing big time when this happens.  Is anyone familiar with 
> this?  Is there a fix?  I know swaping was changed in 2.0.5, but I heard 
> it was for the better, not the worse.....
> 
> Any suggestions, comments, are most welcome.
> 

Since both the kernel and the user-land has changed, it is difficult for
a user to be able to determine where the problem is.  The kernel itself
does swap better.  There are some very limited cases where it *might* be
worse on 2.0.5, but I don't think that you are exercising those mechanisms.
Probably the reason that you are seeing more paging is because the X server
appears to grow bigger than it used to.  This can be because of changes
in X clients, changes in the system (user-land) malloc, or changes in the
X-server itself.

The current resident size of any given process can be obtained by using
the ps command and looking at the RSS field.  The RSS field only accounts
for the pages that are currently mapped into the process and ignores
any aspect of sharing or pages on disk.

The VSZ field might be educational for you... It *does* get big for
XFree V3.1.1 under 2.0.5 (and other OSes like Linux also).

John
dyson@freebsd.org



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