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From: "Ian Kallen" <ian@gamespot.com>
To: questions@freebsd.org
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 23:14:15 +0000
Subject: Re: Stupid Swap Question
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CC: pierre@ebay.com
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What does top report for memory used for cache?  If it's  zero and 
and you're not swapping out, I'd say you've got a big OS 
(configuration) problem.  Otherwise, there could be some tweaks 
needed for network buffers or maybe your apache configuration (my 
money's on the former though).  MaxClient's max'd out?

> Date:          Wed, 24 Jul 1996 17:13:12 -0700
> To:            questions@freebsd.org
> From:          pierre@ebay.com (Pierre Omidyar)
> Subject:       Stupid Swap Question

> Hello folks,
> 
> I am running 2.1.5, from the stable supfile release, and my question is
> about swap space:
> 
> The system has 64M of RAM, and 262M of swap space, split across two disk
> partitions, on separate disks.
> 
> While watching `top' run, I have not been able to catch the system using
> any swap space at all. In fact, I have seen the Memory Free field go down
> to as low as 114K, with no swap usage. (top reports: "Swap:   262M Total,
> 262M Free", and swapinfo, pstat -s, etc., report the same thing.)
> 
> What makes me worry more about this is that at those times, my httpd
> server, apache 1.1.1, is unable to spawn child processes for cgi scripts,
> and writes errors to its log file, as well as giving server error messages
> to my users. No errors are written to /var/log/messages, however.
> 
> This memory problem then quick corrects itself, because apache stops
> running scripts, and the memory free climbs back up to several meg.
> 
> I am not convinced that the apache problem with spawning child processes is
> related to the behavior I'm seeing with swap, but it does seem likely.
> 
> Has anyone seen similar problems with swap?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Pierre
> 
> 
> 
> 
Ian Kallen                           ian@gamespot.com
     Director of Technology & Web Administration
            http://www.gamespot.com