Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 09:40:27 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: "Dan O'Connor" <dan@jgl.reno.nv.us>, "Francis @ TL" <francis@cyberway.com.sg>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Help on FreeBSD (2.2.5) Lite Based 32-bit OS Message-ID: <19990214094027.P54333@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <003501be5724$aa013e80$a03ce4cf@danco.home>; from Dan O'Connor on Fri, Feb 12, 1999 at 11:44:17PM -0800 References: <003501be5724$aa013e80$a03ce4cf@danco.home>
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On Friday, 12 February 1999 at 23:44:17 -0800, Dan O'Connor wrote:
> From: Francis @ TL <francis@cyberway.com.sg>
>
>> 3. What are the consideration and How to calculate the size for these
> partitions?
>
> A typical size for / (root) is 32 MB. I use 128 MB for swap (4x physical
> RAM). And my /usr is all the remaining disk space.
I think you should probably invest 40 MB in /, and I'd recommend a
*large* swap space, about 256 MB (though if you have two disks, you'd
be better off with two 128 MB partitions). You'll see in the `top'
example below that I use 450 MB, and that I'm using 130 MB, mainly
with memory-hungry netscape programs.
>> 6. How to check the bootup time for the server?
>
> I'm not sure what you mean here, but I'd use a stopwatch :-)
>
> An informal time trial shows that on my Pentium 90 machine, FreeBSD boot
> about a minute quicker than Windows 98 does on my P166 machine.
I'm not sure that was the question, though it's difficult to tell.
Another reading might be "how can I tell how long the machine has been
running?". In this case, use uptime:
$ uptime
9:30AM up 93 days, 22:35, 14 users, load averages: 1.04, 0.75, 0.68
>> 9. How to monitor the memory usage?
There are several ways, depending on what you really want to do. The
`top' program will show you current usage and a lot of other stuff:
last pid: 90428; load averages: 0.03, 0.10, 0.05
142 processes: 1 running, 136 sleeping, 5 zombie
CPU states: 22.9% user, 0.0% nice, 9.0% system, 0.7% interrupt, 67.4% idle
Mem: 103M Active, 16M Inact, 25M Wired, 8788K Cache, 8344K Buf, 656K Free
Swap: 450M Total, 130M Used, 320M Free, 28% Inuse
PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND
89298 yana 2 0 31544K 23608K select 99:53 17.92% 17.92% communicator-4
90428 root 28 0 1720K 828K RUN 0:01 7.19% 2.83% top
348 grog 2 0 3104K 1052K select 1:24 2.64% 2.64% xterm
319 grog 2 0 51172K 37920K select 60:12 0.93% 0.93% Xaccel
288 root 2 0 796K 72K select 0:51 0.05% 0.05% moused
334 grog 10 0 2432K 732K nanslp 20:37 0.00% 0.00% xearth
497 grog 10 0 2400K 692K nanslp 19:08 0.00% 0.00% xearth
496 grog 10 0 2444K 740K nanslp 13:20 0.00% 0.00% xearth
335 grog 10 0 2420K 720K nanslp 13:08 0.00% 0.00% xearth
89137 yana 2 0 29128K 18512K select 9:15 0.00% 0.00% communicator-4
I'm not going to try to interpret all this here; it includes
information on different memory statistics and the processes currently
using the most CPU time.
>> 10. How to monitor the CPU usage?
>
> The 'ps' command will give you a snapshot of memory and CPU usage for each
> process. There is software you can use to do live-action monitoring. In
> X-Windows, you can even get little icon-like real-time graphs, ala Norton
> System Doctor.
Or see `top', above.
>> 11.Is there anyway I can uninstall FreeBSD without having to format the
> hard disk?
>
> Well, since the UNIX disk format is different than, say, MS-DOS or Windows
> NT, you'd probably want to reformat. If you install FreeBSD on a machine
> along with other operating systems (a multi-boot) machine, you can reformat
> the FreeBSD partition without disturbing the other OS's.
I disagree on this one. You almost never need to format a hard disk
unless you've had hardware problems.
On the other hand, `uninstalling' FreeBSD is not a FreeBSD function.
If you replace it with a platform which insists on formatting, you'll
have to format. If you replace it with a platform which doesn't
insist on formatting, you won't have to format.
<IMO>
Microsoft seems to have three solutions for problems:
1. Reboot.
2. Reinstall.
3. Format the hard disk and reinstall.
People expect you to have tried all three before reporting a problem.
None of these make sense in a real operating system. If you have
problems with FreeBSD, you should do none of them without a good
reason. In particular, FreeBSD is designed for continuous operation
(see the uptime of over three months in the example above). Rebooting
a multi-user system is a real pain. FreeBSD offers enough tools for
solving most problems without rebooting, and it almost never makes
sense to reinstall.
</IMO>
> Also, I highly recommend Greg Lehey's book "The Complete FreeBSD,"
> available from Walnut Creek CDROM at http://www.cdrom.com/.
Thanks!
Greg
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