From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Mar 5 14:45: 6 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 5DA8737B719 for ; Mon, 5 Mar 2001 14:44:59 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 11820 invoked by uid 100); 5 Mar 2001 22:44:57 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15012.5865.224762.108718@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2001 16:44:57 -0600 To: Bill Moran , Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Question about the size of swap In-Reply-To: <9003721@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.89 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Bill Moran types: > > It seems that handbook suggest we've at least had 2x main memory size of > > > > swap . Is it ok for a machine with 2.5 GB RAM and 500 MB swap space ? > It will work, you can run a system with no swap if you have enough RAM > to hold all your applications. There are some debugging features that > will be unavailable to you if you have less swap than RAM, but if you're > not doing debugging the system will run just fine. Yeah, like dumps of the kernel when you panic :-(. 2x comes from the days when that was the minimum you needed to get a panic dump, and at the time was considered a minimum. If the idea was to stuff the box so that you'd never swap, allocating 500MB as a buffer so you have a warning that you've run out of memory other than running out of virtual, then it's cool. If you're planning on doing things that are going to *use* 2.5GB of real, you probably want to put in more swap. Note that "use" does not include having 2.4GB of disk cache, so some applications may not count. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message