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Date:      Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:13:12 -0700
From:      pierre@ebay.com (Pierre Omidyar)
To:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Stupid Swap Question
Message-ID:  <v02140b02ae1c69c51dbd@[204.156.155.180]>

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Hello folks,

I am running 2.1.5, from the stable supfile release, and my question is
about swap space:

The system has 64M of RAM, and 262M of swap space, split across two disk
partitions, on separate disks.

While watching `top' run, I have not been able to catch the system using
any swap space at all. In fact, I have seen the Memory Free field go down
to as low as 114K, with no swap usage. (top reports: "Swap:   262M Total,
262M Free", and swapinfo, pstat -s, etc., report the same thing.)

What makes me worry more about this is that at those times, my httpd
server, apache 1.1.1, is unable to spawn child processes for cgi scripts,
and writes errors to its log file, as well as giving server error messages
to my users. No errors are written to /var/log/messages, however.

This memory problem then quick corrects itself, because apache stops
running scripts, and the memory free climbs back up to several meg.

I am not convinced that the apache problem with spawning child processes is
related to the behavior I'm seeing with swap, but it does seem likely.

Has anyone seen similar problems with swap?

Cheers,

Pierre





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