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From: "Jonathan M. Bresler" <jmb>
Message-Id: <199710090142.SAA29398@hub.freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Wheres all my memory going?
To: dg@root.com
Date: Wed, 8 Oct 1997 18:42:25 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: reilly@zeta.org.au, gordon@drogon.net, hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199710082352.QAA24445@implode.root.com> from "David Greenman" at Oct 8, 97 04:52:13 pm
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David Greenman wrote:
> 
> >On  8 Oct, David Greenman wrote:
> >>>Machine boots OK. I start named (8.1.1) and it initialises. However, after
> >>>some time (a day or so) the machine start to run out of swap space. I only
> >>>allocated 64M of swap. (Is this the problem?) What I can't figure out is
> >>>where the memory is going. Output of 'top -b' shows:
> >> 
> >>    Yes, you need more swap than you have RAM...this is very important to
> >> avoid problems.
> >
> >Does that mean that it is not possible to run a FreeBSD system without
> >swap at all?  I can think of a number of situations (mostly kind of
> >embedded) where you can arrange to satisfy all of the memory
> >requirements with RAM, but don't want to add a disk or use a network
> >for swap.
> 
>    That's what it means. As soon as the free pages get depleted and the system
> tries to reclaim some memory, it will get unhappy and start killing off
> processes rather than recaiming only unmodified pages or whatever. This is a
> problem that needs to be dealt with in the future.

	something really hideous....swap to an MFS partition?