From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 2 10:55:35 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.6) id KAA19014 for questions-outgoing; Wed, 2 Aug 1995 10:55:35 -0700 Received: (from dyson@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.6) id KAA19004 ; Wed, 2 Aug 1995 10:55:35 -0700 From: John Dyson Message-Id: <199508021755.KAA19004@freefall.cdrom.com> Subject: Re: 2.0.5 Eager to go into swap To: apollo@io.org (Andrew Herdman) Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 10:55:34 -0700 (PDT) Cc: freebsd-questions@freefall.cdrom.com In-Reply-To: from "Andrew Herdman" at Aug 2, 95 01:29:02 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1555 Sender: questions-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > > 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