Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 16:21:45 -0700 (PDT) From: Doug White <dwhite@riley-net170-164.uoregon.edu> To: "Paul J. Mech" <paul@coil.com> Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Considering FreeBSD Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.960728161842.226D-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu> In-Reply-To: <31F898AB.1DE87A12@coil.com>
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On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Paul J. Mech wrote: > To all who have responded, thanks very much for your comments. I am > definitely going to try installing FreeBSD. I have a few technical questions > though. > > 0) When Linux runs out of virtual memory, it crashes. What is FreeBSD's > behavior under these conditions? FreeBSD will start killing processes until the memory problem is resolved. This usually means the program that is trying to start, and working backward. Occaisionally the VM system gets too busy and kills init, but that is very rare. > 1) What is the standard maximum on the number of open files (system wide and > per user) on FreeBSD? How severe is the penalty for increasing these? It's a per-shell basis, I believe. csh/tcsh has a command to limit the number I know. Perhaps others more familiar with the kernel can comment. The penalty would be higher memory consumption. > 2) Linux can use any available free memory for file buffers, so that under > light loads some files may end up being accessed entirely from memory. Does > FreeBSD do this, or does it do a fixed pool of buffers. The merged VM/buffer cache system will allocate unused physical memory to the disk cache, and adjusts this number dynamically depending on memory demands. So I guess it's a similar mechanism. Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major
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