Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 22:50:29 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: "Jonathan Hamel" <los_alamos@hotmail.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org, <danfe@inet.ssc.nsu.ru> Subject: Re: Swap strategy Message-ID: <15026.60693.971478.600561@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <82812874@toto.iv>
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Jonathan Hamel <los_alamos@hotmail.com> types: > <danfe@inet.ssc.nsu.ru>: > >having to run XFree86-4, pretty heavy mozilla + netscape (I know netscape > >sux, but I need to make sure my sites look the same in both browsers) + I'm curious - do you actually try browsers that aren't designed to look as much alike as possible? W3m? Lynx? Links? Amaya? Opera? > I've had questions about this myself. I remember that Linux installs > generally recommend your swap space be at least double your RAM (so since I > have 64MB in this machine, my swap would be 128MB). Does the same apply to > the BSD systems as well? The 2x rule comes from wanting to do be able to get uncorrupted core dumps. I consider it a bare minimum for any system for which you might want to debug system crashes. For most normal desktop use, it's probably more than sufficient, if you have enough memory for decent performance. The last sentence is the real clue. By the time you're running out of swap, under normal conditions your performance has gone to hell in a handbasket. You need to make sure you've got enough real to provide decent performance. Having taken care of that, 2x is probably enough. Given the difficulty of increasing swap, the low cost of disk, and my penchant for memory-hungry things like LISP compilers, I tend to go with 4x. A laundry list of applications isn't really helpful in figuring out how much memory you need. Usage patterns have a lot to do with it. Some things - desktop managers, for instance - are known to be pigs and in constant use. Others depend very much on your usage patterns. If you always start a new netscape to look at a page, then shut it down, it won't make much difference. If you leave it open all the time, and have windows open on all 20 pages you're currently working on, it might produce a noticable load. If your apache (which you don't really need for doing static HTML) sits in the background doing nothing unless you load a page from it, it's negligible. If you've got a couple of browser windows open pulling stats from it at regular intervals, things will be different. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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