From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Sep 26 11:12:25 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 15E9B16A4B3 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:12:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from quasi.uchicago.edu (quasi.uchicago.edu [128.135.99.55]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DC7214401E for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 11:12:23 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sluggo@unknown.nu) Received: from unknown.nu (anita.uchicago.edu [128.135.99.35]) by quasi.uchicago.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 315F5F4E0 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 2003 13:12:23 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <3F748186.2060108@unknown.nu> Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 13:12:22 -0500 From: Kim Scarborough User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20030916 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-PGP-Public-Key: http://www.unknown.nu/kim/pub.asc X-Painting-Of-My-Cat: http://www.unknown.nu/kim/images/jinx.gif Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Memory problems X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 18:12:25 -0000 I'm encountering problems because of a somewhat screwy configuration and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions. I'm running 4.8-RELEASE-p1 on a machine with a 1200-mhz CPU and 64MB of RAM. The swap partition is 112 MB; I was running out of swap so I added a 256MB swapfile on /usr. Adding RAM, unfortunately, is not an option. Because (I assume) of the really fast processor and low memory, the machine frequently goes bezerk. Basically when any process takes a lot of memory (like, say, running "grepmail" on several files, or running vim on a 10MB mail spool), the load suddenly shoots through the roof and the box becomes unresponsive until a reboot. Anything I can do about this? I'd rather processes just die for a lack of memory than having the box go down anytime a user on there does something memory-intensive. What options do I have? And should I delete that extra swapfile? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kim Scarborough http://www.unknown.nu/kim/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Football combines the two worst features of American life: violence and committee meetings." -George Will ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now listening to: Aqua Regia - "Aqueous" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------