From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jan 31 17:36:02 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id RAA03321 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 17:36:02 -0800 (PST) Received: from genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au [129.127.96.120]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA03287 for ; Wed, 31 Jan 1996 17:35:51 -0800 (PST) Received: from msmith@localhost by genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au (8.6.12/8.6.9) id MAA20860; Thu, 1 Feb 1996 12:19:37 +1030 From: Michael Smith Message-Id: <199602010149.MAA20860@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Subject: Re: Good news -- pipe stuff To: jehamby@lightside.com (Jake Hamby) Date: Thu, 1 Feb 1996 12:19:37 +1030 (CST) Cc: peter@jhome.DIALix.COM, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Jake Hamby" at Jan 31, 96 10:31:56 am MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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 [[ ]] High-speed data acquisition and (GSM mobile) 0411-222-496 [[ ]] realtime instrument control (ph/fax) +61-8-267-3039 [[ ]] "wherever you go, there you are" - Buckaroo Banzai [[