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Date:      Thu, 1 Feb 1996 12:19:37 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby)
Cc:        peter@jhome.DIALix.COM, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Good news -- pipe stuff
Message-ID:  <199602010149.MAA20860@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960131102030.15314A-100000@covina.lightside.com> from "Jake Hamby" at Jan 31, 96 10:31:56 am

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Jake Hamby stands accused of saying:
> 
> Another thing to look into, although I don't have a benchmark on this, but
> FreeBSD has a nasty tendency to "bind" during heavy VM/disk activity.  I
> don't know if this is because the IDE driver is CPU intensive, or if this
> affects people (to a lesser extent) with SCSI drives.  It's just that when
> the system starts paging out to disk, activity in other windows freezes up
> too.  I have 24MB of RAM on my box at home, and notice this quite often, 
> which is even more surprising since I don't push my system more than, say, 
> running a copy of Netscape, emacs, pine, and maybe a compile. 

This is a combination of IDE, and the X server being blocked on a pagefault
that can't be serviced immediately because others are.

Netscape is a real evil; it's not at all hard for it to eat >10M with only
one browser open (remember the X server grows too).

> Speaking of VM, I set up a system with only 8MB of RAM running FreeBSD, 
> and even though we made a 24MB swap partition, occasionally it fills up.  
> Both boxes are running 2.1.0-RELEASE.  If it is not too difficult, I 
> would be REALLY grateful if we could add functionality to add swapfiles 
> and swap partitions to a running system.  Even better would be the 

You can.  See 'swapon' and 'vnconfig'.

> ability to remove the swapfile without rebooting.  Linux (and most 

That's not so easy.

> SVR4's) have had this functionality for a LONG time.  As it is, our BSD 
> limitation of only swapping to the b slice of any particular partition is 
> EXTREMELY frustrating in such situations where extra swap is temporarily 
> needed.

Where is this limitation?  You can swap anywhere you like.

> ---Jake

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au    [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@atrad.adelaide.edu.au   [[
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