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Date:      Thu, 1 Oct 2009 10:43:45 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Bill Moran <wmoran@potentialtech.com>
Cc:        Liste FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Swap and memory optimization
Message-ID:  <20091001154345.GN29215@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <20091001073919.9e05d056.wmoran@potentialtech.com>
References:  <176FD00A-5791-4D3E-B7F3-D5F0A0AE2037@todoo.biz> <20091001073919.9e05d056.wmoran@potentialtech.com>

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In the last episode (Oct 01), Bill Moran said:
> bsd <bsd@todoo.biz> wrote:
> > I have a FBSD 6.4p7 box that I use as a mail server - 1Go RAM - RAID1
> > Works quite well.
> > 
> > As I plan to put 100 more mail accounts soon on the server I was
> > wondering if the memory & swap was ok on the server considering these
> > figures:
> > 
> > last pid: 18956;  load averages:  0.04,  0.11,  0.05 up  19+08:36:23  09:53:38
> > 125 processes: 1 running, 124 sleeping
> > CPU:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  1.5% system,  0.4% interrupt, 98.1% idle
> > Mem: 499M Active, 70M Inact, 362M Wired, 41M Cache, 111M Buf, 20M Free
> > Swap: 2000M Total, 160M Used, 1840M Free, 8% Inuse
> > 
> > Though It looks good to me - the server swaps a bit (between 8 to 14%)
> > and there is not much memory left.
> 
> Looks like the server would run more smoothly with a bit more RAM.  At
> least an additional 256M, I would think, but considering the price of RAM,
> you might as well just up it to 2G.

The amount of used swap is much less important than whether you are actively
swapping (if there are In/Out values on the Swap line in top, or if "vmstat
1" shows nonzero values in the pi/po columns).  160MB of used swap is fine
if it's just unused daemons (getty, idle webserver, etc).  More memory can
never hurt, but it doesn't seem like it's urgently needed here.

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com



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