Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 29 Aug 1996 18:14:24 -0500 (EST)
From:      "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net>
To:        scott@statsci.com
Cc:        dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu, Eric.Berenguier@sycomore.fr, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 2.1.0 CRASH!
Message-ID:  <199608292314.SAA00793@dyson.iquest.net>
In-Reply-To: <m0uwC7Q-000JTGC@main.statsci.com> from "Scott Blachowicz" at Aug 29, 96 11:47:07 am

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> the swap area is the total virtual address space or just an extension of
> the RAM (i.e.
> 
>   sizeof(virtual addr space) == sizeof(RAM)+ sizeof(swap)
> 
> instead of just
> 
>   sizeof(virtual addr space) == sizeof(swap)
> 
> ). If on a system doing the latter, 20Mb is definitely not enough swap for
> 16Mb of RAM.  I don't really know which category FreeBSD falls into (it
> could be that any recent OS uses the former method...I don't know).
> 
FreeBSD uses the latter -- therefore it is not necessary or desirable to
free swap space everytime pages are paged in.   (The only time that we do
it is when memory (total virtual address space free) is low.)  IMO, it is
best to keep swap space in contiguous chunks.  I guess that it would be
possible to do so if all paging in operations read an entire chunk, but
anyway disk is very very cheap.  (20MBytes of extra disk calculates out
to be about $5 to $10, maybe less, maybe more...)

John



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199608292314.SAA00793>