From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Jan 25 11:21:41 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id LAA06127 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 25 Jan 1998 11:21:41 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from dyson.iquest.net (dyson.iquest.net [198.70.144.127]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id LAA05998 for ; Sun, 25 Jan 1998 11:21:26 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from toor@dyson.iquest.net) Received: (from root@localhost) by dyson.iquest.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) id OAA29993; Sun, 25 Jan 1998 14:21:19 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from toor) From: "John S. Dyson" Message-Id: <199801251921.OAA29993@dyson.iquest.net> Subject: Re: FBSD222 without swap In-Reply-To: from Jaroslav Klaus at "Jan 25, 98 08:10:20 pm" To: J.Klaus@sh.cvut.cz (Jaroslav Klaus) Date: Sun, 25 Jan 1998 14:21:19 -0500 (EST) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL32 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk Jaroslav Klaus said: [Charset iso-8859-2 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > Hello, > > I tried to kickout my swap partition. But when a alloc more memory > (SIZE 48M, RES 37 - sum of all procs) system usages goes up quickly > (up to 98%, 900-1200 Syscalls) when I move window. After I "swapon" > my 100MB swap partition system usages will goes down to normal value > (10-15% for moving window). Can anybody explain me this? > > I have FreeBSD 222, Intel P100, FIC PA2000, 64MB EDO RAM, SPEA MIRAGE P64+ > The system sees that you have lots of unneeded pages, and pushes them out. 3.0-current has much better support for minimizing or eliminating swap usage, but running without swap is problematical especially on earlier versions. The way that FreeBSD VM works is that it is assumed that backing store is much cheaper than memory. That isn't always true, and there is new code that allows that policy to be biased differently. The behavior that you are seeing is the ideal, given the policy that I had hoped to achieve. Note that the lack of free memory doesn't mean that your system is doomed to crash, but it is "playing with fire" to run without swap at all. -- John | Never try to teach a pig to sing, dyson@freebsd.org | it just makes you look stupid, jdyson@nc.com | and it irritates the pig.