From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Fri Sep 29 06:53:44 2017 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 394D9E251E5 for ; Fri, 29 Sep 2017 06:53:44 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from matthew@FreeBSD.org) Received: from smtp.infracaninophile.co.uk (smtp.infracaninophile.co.uk [IPv6:2001:8b0:151:1:c4ea:bd49:619b:6cb3]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (Client CN "smtp.infracaninophile.co.uk", Issuer "infracaninophile.co.uk" (not verified)) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B142C80840 for ; Fri, 29 Sep 2017 06:53:43 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from matthew@FreeBSD.org) Received: from liminal.local (unknown [IPv6:2001:8b0:151:1:1c1d:86a1:a200:b700]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk) by smtp.infracaninophile.co.uk (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 11C3A12B7F for ; Fri, 29 Sep 2017 06:53:42 +0000 (UTC) Authentication-Results: smtp.infracaninophile.co.uk; dmarc=none header.from=FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: A few questions about FreeBSD To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: From: Matthew Seaman Message-ID: Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2017 07:53:35 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.3.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha512; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="umpmc6okMnEmCEEdkCh2RpnhupiIuVWa1" X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2017 06:53:44 -0000 This is an OpenPGP/MIME signed message (RFC 4880 and 3156) --umpmc6okMnEmCEEdkCh2RpnhupiIuVWa1 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="PC9sGAaCElLgkmkPMsqR6WqC4uoKVwvmn"; protected-headers="v1" From: Matthew Seaman To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Message-ID: Subject: Re: A few questions about FreeBSD References: In-Reply-To: --PC9sGAaCElLgkmkPMsqR6WqC4uoKVwvmn Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-GB Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On 29/09/2017 06:37, Manish Jain wrote: > 1) As a desktop system, is it needed to have a swap partition at all ? = > My system is AMD Athlon X2 270 with 8 GB DDR3 RAM and no swap, running = > KDE4. The box works wonderfully for me. >=20 > Is swap advisable for 8 GB ? 4 GB ? 2GB RAM ? >=20 > Less than that much is essentially unheard of nowadays. How much swap to configure depends very much on your workload. Nowadays however I think the assumption is that you should have enough RAM to contain your whole workload /without/ actively swapping. Some inactive memory pages may still be swapped out -- but these tend to be only a small amount and the system wouldn't really suffer if it couldn't swap them out. Swap then becomes principally the backing store for things like tmpfs. OTOH, it is actually very easy to use up many GB of memory for normal desktop activities. Some web browsers are notorious memory hogs. So having swap available to act as a buffer should you run out of available RAM is still a good idea -- it saves on the alternative, which is the kernel arbitrarily killing off large processes in order to relieve the out-of-memory condition. How much swap to allocate? I think for "small" memory systems -- say up to 4GB -- the old rule of swap =3D 2 * RAM is still a good one. For bigger memory systems, allocating twice that much as swap is just wasteful. Maxing out at 8GB swap would not be unreasonable. But these are just rules of thumb, and should be adapted to whatever your workload actually requires. > 2) Since I do not use video-chat, I needed some tips about video-chat=20 > software that works well under FreeBSD. Would that be Jitsi ? Skype ? I know iXsystems has a video chat solution that works well in Firefox on Trueos. Most Video Conferencing setups rely on WebRTC support in your web browser, which in theory should work fine with FreeBSD, but in practise seems to be very OS and version dependent. IIRC, Google Hangouts have been known to work with Chrome on FBSD, but no idea if that is still the case -- they stopped working with Firefox on many platforms over the last few months (which was down to Firefox changing things, not Google.) Cheers, Matthew --PC9sGAaCElLgkmkPMsqR6WqC4uoKVwvmn-- --umpmc6okMnEmCEEdkCh2RpnhupiIuVWa1 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name="signature.asc" Content-Description: OpenPGP digital signature Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="signature.asc" -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQJ8BAEBCgBmBQJZze31XxSAAAAAAC4AKGlzc3Vlci1mcHJAbm90YXRpb25zLm9w ZW5wZ3AuZmlmdGhob3JzZW1hbi5uZXQ2NTNBNjhCOTEzQTRFNkNGM0UxRTEzMjZC QjIzQUY1MThFMUE0MDEzAAoJELsjr1GOGkATsngP/3xvhRaLjUpOCamhGrWbxb9A HMP4qDLqP9OPb9cUUbGQOfd7rvAW4IHFYsb7L/R5l4SOxL/YOWZfp7XikAdVsnID 1rTtGaKpgtTIGwrOUpfMCvnVUeno8DT4TcInx3HmcvzoHJy7nw7F3886W1UChfin BfzbT/ilU1r0M5iNw2oR49oBV67oRmA2/egBPJxNy/DdwIqmsGVr5hHOJeDBsLfE AA5Wf98ZCRIzcX7TSZoxZlcHiaCu4dGvffnsiHv8V46D0UzURQVEzJgB0380Oxsu TMVPRHpStqWMo4gOd53wKLQw2EhHSF48+dchvlIPa7b6ABzISY2+Ek7uThcaqGSY MzCx4LAabb6+4YANJYU/g8xJ1ebiAsbDDkt/NX2+rzt/fPre8dcaAo+2gleMpNdR xj7HbWV/9Tk45uYNhUuAzu4dClgrf4AnGvlG6m9yly0HqzffOpzJIVXFSTcjIYPF OP+/PN7Zq5GyWWwQyu7K1cLxs6JDRmE2oXVZA23OuqZ2oo9ZT+sFjqtLI2XOw7C1 I6CStErmy4y/fCmFsrPj+GhuA/Qzkg5asSgu3KPOG5PuMCLeGtufCknerFgKFij5 Gi9b2iwM+mpDjyjbNOq+MiKk+OrqOLu8hfSfLr4Rx2ggvXIqEckTxMf4PEnI2MMU YeoHbtqaD68eEQjUY++X =df3J -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --umpmc6okMnEmCEEdkCh2RpnhupiIuVWa1--