Date: Thu, 1 Aug 2002 11:09:40 -0400 From: Rob Ellis <rob@web.ca> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 1GB ram, how much SWAP? Message-ID: <20020801150939.GF77297@web.ca> In-Reply-To: <20020801042008.GD48188@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20020731171728.GH22253@web.ca> <87u1mfk9me.fsf@pooh.int> <20020731194842.GL22253@web.ca> <44ado7ejh7.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> <20020731211506.GN22253@web.ca> <20020801042008.GD48188@wantadilla.lemis.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>o Even with light memory loads, the virtual memory system slowly pages out data > in preparation for a possible sudden demand for memory. This means that it > can be more responsive to such requests. As a result, you should have at > least as much swap as memory. this is an argument for some swap, but i don't follow how it means you need at least as much swap as memory... can you explain that a bit more? >o About the only ways to change the size of a swap partition are to add another > partition or to reinstall the system, so if you're not sure, a little bit > more won't do any harm, but too little can really be a problem. if you find you're running out of swap, you can create swap files, although i guess that's less efficient? there's also the argument that if you ever plan to add more memory, you want to add swap to prepare for that possibility. so one scenario is that you want as much swap as the ram your machine can take +1MB. in practice, though, if you add a lot of memory, you probably need less swap (except for the kernel's preparation for swap it will never need ;-) and for crash dumps). > The dump routines can only dump to a single partition, so you need one that > is big enough. If you have 512 MB of memory and two swap partitions of 384 > MB each, you still will not be able to dump. is the average user going to be analyzing crash dumps? how often does this come up? if dumpon is turned off by default, when would you want to turn it on, what would you do after that...? allocating 2GB+1M of swap on a new machine really isn't going to be a problem -- especially with cheap UDMA disks of 60GB+ -- but if it's just going to sit there, it offends my sense of economy... :-) - rob To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020801150939.GF77297>