From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Aug 18 7:56:37 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from bingnet2.cc.binghamton.edu (bingnet2.cc.binghamton.edu [128.226.1.18]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D491214D4C for ; Wed, 18 Aug 1999 07:56:32 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu) Received: from sol.cs.binghamton.edu (cs1-gw.cs.binghamton.edu [128.226.171.72]) by bingnet2.cc.binghamton.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id KAA14186; Wed, 18 Aug 1999 10:54:47 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 18 Aug 1999 10:41:28 -0400 (EDT) From: Zhihui Zhang To: "James F. Young" Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: swap size with 256mb ram(newbie) In-Reply-To: <37BABFD9.BD5CEAE7@home.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 18 Aug 1999, James F. Young wrote: > I set bsd up using the automatic settings which defaulted to double my > physical ram. I am trying to determine if a 500+mb swap is actually > necessary with that much or if I can just make one thats is linux style > (e.g equal to my physical mem of 256) Making the swap space twice as large as your memory is a thumb of rule, which is said in many CS text books I believe. But that does not mean your computer can not run if you have less swap space. Suppose you have only a couple of small processes, who is going to use that much of swap space? However, if you are running large applications and memory becomes in short supply, some processes must be swappped out. Otherwise, the OS will start killing your processes to make room for others (I am not sure about this point though). Anyway, this question is general in OS. I mean it is not FreeBSD style or Linux style. To determine how many swap space in use, you may try the command swapinfo (I do not have much experience on this). Hope these help. -Zhihui To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message