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Date: Thu, 3 Aug 95 22:14:30 CDT
Message-Id: <9508040314.AA08406@ihats103.ih.att.com>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: 2.0.5 Eager to go into swap
Sender: questions-owner@freebsd.org
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I thought I'd add a data point to the discussion regarding excessive swapping
causes by X...

Jim Howard writes in response to this issue: of excessive paging by X:

>But those differences are small, and they still don't explain  the horrendous
>swapping generated by X, unless the decision to swap is totally blind to
>page sharing, which makes no sense.


TO add an additional data point to the fray, I'm running the june snap of
2.0.5, 16M, 128M swap spread accross 3 disks (one IDE, two SCSI's) with
the drive LED's extended to the outside of my case so I can see disk
activity.  I normally run X with 3 opened xterm's, the window manager,
the normal daemons, getty's, etc.  I begin to swap once I start the
third "cc -pipe".  I've learned not to "gmake -jN" with N > 3.  With
three cc'c going, there's some paging, but it's intermitent, and does not
seem to impact throughput.  Once I exceed three cc's, then I see the xterm's
being swapped out and a lot of thrashing as I move the mouse into and
out of the xterm windows.

So, I see no excessive paging problem with 2.0.5 running X on my system.
Of course, I only began using FreeBSD 6 months ago with 2.0, so I don't know
if it ran X better with previous releases.

Dave Bodenstab
imdave@ihats1.ih.att.com