From owner-freebsd-hardware Thu Aug 24 07:31:45 1995 Return-Path: hardware-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) id HAA22106 for hardware-outgoing; Thu, 24 Aug 1995 07:31:45 -0700 Received: from beru.wustl.edu (beru.wustl.edu [128.252.157.65]) by freefall.FreeBSD.org (8.6.11/8.6.6) with SMTP id HAA22100 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 1995 07:31:43 -0700 Received: by beru.wustl.edu (4.1/ECL-A1.21) id AA00576; Thu, 24 Aug 95 09:30:54 CDT Date: Thu, 24 Aug 95 09:30:54 CDT Message-Id: <9508241430.AA00576@beru.wustl.edu> From: Brian Gottlieb To: -Vince- Cc: Gary Palmer , freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine In-Reply-To: References: <9508231447.AA01604@beru.wustl.edu> Sender: hardware-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk -Vince- (-Vince-) writes: -Vince-> On Wed, 23 Aug 1995, Brian Gottlieb wrote: >> >> It all depends on what you're doing with it. In my machine at work I >> have a 400 meg drive dedicated to swap. The circuit synthesis and >> simulations we run here need LOTS of memory and swap. The "big" >> machines in our group have 256M of memory and a 1 Gig swap drive. -Vince-> Hmmm, is there like a way to do well with a big swap and -Vince-> like 16 megs of physical memory? How much physical memory is -Vince-> on the machine with 400 meg swap? Today is a good day to answer this. Last night I got a memory upgrade. There is now 192M of ram in the machine (I feel like a kid in a playground..."My machine could beat up your machine" ;) When I originally wrote this, I had 64M RAM. But the synthesiser swapped too much and took way to long to run on here. With more memory, it swapped less and ran much faster. I don't remember the numbers, but it was very significant. A Sparc 5 with 192M RAM was keeping up with a Sparc 10 with 128M. One factor we probably didn't consider was that the 10 may have had a faster disk on it. I'm no expert on things, but I think there is a point where you may get diminishing returns on having lots of swap. On the other hand, I have 16 Megs RAM in my freebsd machine and 32 megs of swap, and I have run out of memory a few times. More swap would probably help. But perhaps if I got my swap too big, it may become less efficient since I could run more programs, but it would spend more time swapping. I don't know. To tell the truth, the 400 Megs of swap on here probably rarely gets filled up, since I typically ran my simulations elsewhere. But I know that the Sparc 10 in the office upstairs was swapping like mad when I ran stuff on it (I could almost hear the drive down here ;). Hmm...long post. So the answer is...I have no clue ;) brian