Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 22:06:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@chuckr.org> To: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.uu.se> Cc: FreeBSD Hackers List <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: swap & huge mem systems Message-ID: <20020708220517.K945-100000@april.chuckr.org> In-Reply-To: <20020709015454.GA6323@falcon.midgard.homeip.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Erik Trulsson wrote: > On Mon, Jul 08, 2002 at 09:30:04PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote: > > Nowadays, what with the price of fast memory at such low levels, I'm > > buying more memory than I really need, just because it's *so* cheap, the > > price has gone up before, and it's possible (maybe likely) that next > > year's popular new app will need the memory. I'm probably not alone in > > doing this. It's causing me to wonder about how much swap to allocate. > > > > I used to follow the rule that I dedicate twice as much disk memory to > > swap as I have RAM. Now, with my new system, I'm getting a gig of RAM, > > but it seems ridiculous to dedicate 2G of disk to swap. Under these > > conditions, what's the real bottom limit (if you have one gig of RAM) for > > how much swap you can get away with? One Gig? Less? > > Minimal amount of swap possible: No swap at all of course. > Minimal swap if you want to be able to catch core dumps: Physical RAM > size + 64K > Minimal amount of swap you need: Depends on what you are doing, > doesn't it? > > > You don't need to configure any swap at all if you think your RAM is > going to be large enough for everything you do. > > OTOH, considering how cheap disk space is these days, why worry about a > gigabyte or two? Some day you might be running some extremly memory > hungry application(s) and then you might neeed that extra swap. > Running out of swap is No Fun, and should be avoided if practical. > > Personally, in your situation I would probably configure enough swap to > be able to catch a core dump and not much more, i.e. slightly more than > 1G swap. Probably a good compromise, it just feels silly to go for a G of swap when I will probably never use more than 256M (and that not very often). I mostly compile, edit, and web-browse. Thanks for the confirmation (I suspected this answer, but I feel better now about it). > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include C & Java programming, FreeBSD, chuckr@chuckr.org | electronics, communications, and signal processing. New Year's Resolution: I will not sphroxify gullible people into looking up fictitious words in the dictionary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020708220517.K945-100000>