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Date:      Wed, 18 Aug 1999 10:41:28 -0400 (EDT)
From:      Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
To:        "James F. Young" <napalmski@home.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: swap size with 256mb ram(newbie)
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.3.96.990818103406.21929C-100000@sol.cs.binghamton.edu>
In-Reply-To: <37BABFD9.BD5CEAE7@home.com>

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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



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