Date: Thu, 24 Aug 95 09:30:54 CDT From: Brian Gottlieb <brian@arl.wustl.edu> To: -Vince- <vince@penzance.econ.yale.edu> Cc: Gary Palmer <gary@palmer.demon.co.uk>, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to my machine Message-ID: <9508241430.AA00576@beru.wustl.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.91.950823183620.3064F-100000@penzance.econ.yale.edu> References: <9508231447.AA01604@beru.wustl.edu> <Pine.LNX.3.91.950823183620.3064F-100000@penzance.econ.yale.edu>
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-Vince- <vince@penzance.econ.yale.edu> (-Vince-) writes: -Vince-> On Wed, 23 Aug 1995, Brian Gottlieb wrote: >> >> It all depends on what you're doing with it. In my machine at work I >> have a 400 meg drive dedicated to swap. The circuit synthesis and >> simulations we run here need LOTS of memory and swap. The "big" >> machines in our group have 256M of memory and a 1 Gig swap drive. -Vince-> Hmmm, is there like a way to do well with a big swap and -Vince-> like 16 megs of physical memory? How much physical memory is -Vince-> on the machine with 400 meg swap? Today is a good day to answer this. Last night I got a memory upgrade. There is now 192M of ram in the machine (I feel like a kid in a playground..."My machine could beat up your machine" ;) When I originally wrote this, I had 64M RAM. But the synthesiser swapped too much and took way to long to run on here. With more memory, it swapped less and ran much faster. I don't remember the numbers, but it was very significant. A Sparc 5 with 192M RAM was keeping up with a Sparc 10 with 128M. One factor we probably didn't consider was that the 10 may have had a faster disk on it. I'm no expert on things, but I think there is a point where you may get diminishing returns on having lots of swap. On the other hand, I have 16 Megs RAM in my freebsd machine and 32 megs of swap, and I have run out of memory a few times. More swap would probably help. But perhaps if I got my swap too big, it may become less efficient since I could run more programs, but it would spend more time swapping. I don't know. To tell the truth, the 400 Megs of swap on here probably rarely gets filled up, since I typically ran my simulations elsewhere. But I know that the Sparc 10 in the office upstairs was swapping like mad when I ran stuff on it (I could almost hear the drive down here ;). Hmm...long post. So the answer is...I have no clue ;) brian
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