From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu May 21 15:51:56 2015 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher AECDH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id D02164D3 for ; Thu, 21 May 2015 15:51:56 +0000 (UTC) Received: from cosmo.uchicago.edu (cosmo.uchicago.edu [128.135.70.90]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ACFFC1F7B for ; Thu, 21 May 2015 15:51:56 +0000 (UTC) Received: by cosmo.uchicago.edu (Postfix, from userid 48) id 465D8CB8C9C; Thu, 21 May 2015 10:51:55 -0500 (CDT) Received: from 128.135.70.2 (SquirrelMail authenticated user valeri) by cosmo.uchicago.edu with HTTP; Thu, 21 May 2015 10:51:55 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <43064.128.135.70.2.1432223515.squirrel@cosmo.uchicago.edu> In-Reply-To: References: Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 10:51:55 -0500 (CDT) Subject: Re: End user RAM usage survey From: "Valeri Galtsev" To: "grarpamp" Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Reply-To: galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu User-Agent: SquirrelMail/1.4.8-5.el5.centos.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Importance: Normal X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 21 May 2015 15:51:56 -0000 On Thu, May 21, 2015 4:41 am, grarpamp wrote: > For those of you using end user class systems bought within the > last few years (Intel: i3, i5, i7, E3; AMD: APU, FX) for things > such as desktop, fileserver, multimedia, browsing, development, > office, games, and VMs for the same... how much memory are you > using? (including swap, excluding ZFS) Majority of our FreeBSD machines are AMD Opterons (2 or 4 socket single to 16 core CPUs), they are servers mostly converted into such from retired (re-purposed) number crunchers, so they usually have larger amounts of RAM than they actually need. Anyway: RAM from 8GB to 64GB (the larger RAM machines can host really many jails). I also have a special note on swap. FreeBSD seems to want you badly to have swap, so I do have swap of FreeBSD machines. However, I never make swap larger than 4GB. If you come to the point you have to swap out some memory pages to disk, then you definitely need extra RAM. Which is cheap, just add RAM. I do respect FreeBDS's requiring me to have some swap. That is the only reason I do have swap on FreeBSD machines. I run a bunch of Linux number crunching machines with large amounts of RAM (16 GB - 512 GB of RAM). I never had set any swap on these machines (running Linux, as you may notice, I'm less respectful to what Linux usual recommendations are - relying more on my own insight there). Just imagine that you need to swap out to disk 4GB, and back from disk into RAM, and this you will have to do any time you switch to and from some of the processes. Process switching happens on the order of milliseconds. And each of the switching requiring swapping will take as long ad disk read/write takes, which is many seconds. The need of such swapping will just bring your box to its knees. Just my $0.02 Valeri ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++