*BSD News Article 21601


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From: newsserv!stark!gene@cs.sunysb.edu (Gene Stark)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Disk Thrashing question
Date: 28 Sep 93 07:37:16
Organization: Gene Stark's home system
Lines: 48
Message-ID: <NEWSSERV!STARK!GENE.93Sep28073716@stark.uucp>
References: <1993Sep27.170443.444@doug.cae.wisc.edu> <2884k2$d9k@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
	<rich.749200452@isr0004.urh.uiuc.edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: stark.uucp
In-reply-to: rich@isr0004.urh.uiuc.edu's message of 28 Sep 93 07:13:58 GMT

In article <rich.749200452@isr0004.urh.uiuc.edu> rich@isr0004.urh.uiuc.edu (Rich) writes:

   nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes:

   >In article <1993Sep27.170443.444@doug.cae.wisc.edu>,
   >John Edward Tillema <tillemaj@cae.wisc.edu> wrote:
   >>
   >>
   >>	I have had FreeBSD running for about a month or so on my 486
   >>now, and have noticed one major disadvantage to it compared to Linux
   >>(at least for me).  It seems to take virtually nothing to cause me
   >>to start swapping like crazy, and even hang the system.  My setup is:
   >>8 Meg Ram, 17 Meg swap space, 486/33, 340 Meg drive, with 300 for Unix.
   > ^^^^^^^^^

   >>If i run anything in the background, or compile one program, or sun
   >>a comm program, you can hear the disk swapping like crazy and performance
   >>really drops(you can easily type a line of text before the first character
   >>is printed).  I can even hang the system.  I found a good way of doing
   >>this is the following:
   >>   run olvwm.
   >>   run XV and view a gif (or jpg, or probably anything), not necessarily
   >>          large, the last one was only 200k.
   >>   run emacs and load in a large file, here I'm talking about a 7 meg file.

   >With X running (2 - 3 MB), and xv (probably 1 MB with the image displayed)
   >the system (2 MB in memory) AND emacs ( 1 MB for emacs + 7 MB for the
   >file you're editing ) you've used up more space than you have available.

   I have 8 meg too and I have noticed the same problem... NetBSD hung when 
   i tried to compile xv. And i was not even in X at the time. I had two
   users with screen running. That's ridiculous, When i compiled xv on linux i 

I would say that you don't have your swap area configured properly.
I ran 386BSD 0.1 + (patchkits) for A YEAR with 8MB of RAM and only 10MB
of swap space, and I could run X, Emacs, and compile stuff without running
out of memory.  The only time I would run out of memory is if I tried
to run Standard ML while X was running.

Granted, 386BSD and FreeBSD do not fail gracefully when memory runs out,
but it really sounds like your system is not finding your swap area.
Try running the "swapinfo" command to see what it says.  Make sure that
you have the "swapon -a" command in your /etc/rc.  Make sure that your
disklabel has your b partition labeled as swap.

						- Gene Stark
--
							stark@cs.sunysb.edu