*BSD News Article 21613


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Disk Thrashing question
Message-ID: <CE57uz.8ts@latcs1.lat.oz.au>
From: wongm@latcs4.lat.oz.au (M.C. Wong)
Date: Thu, 30 Sep 1993 01:23:23 GMT
Sender: news@latcs1.lat.oz.au (news)
References: <2884k2$d9k@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <rich.749200452@isr0004.urh.uiuc.edu> <NEWSSERV!STARK!GENE.93Sep28073716@stark.uucp>
Organization: Comp Sci, La Trobe Uni, Australia
Nntp-Posting-Host: latcs4.lat.oz.au
Lines: 61

In article <NEWSSERV!STARK!GENE.93Sep28073716@stark.uucp> newsserv!stark!gene@cs.sunysb.edu (Gene Stark) writes:
>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

Hi,
  I used to have this (disk thrashing or swapping) problem too configured
with the initial installed 5M swap , thanks to 386BSD installtion procedure
that does not let you have control over initial disk partition. But ever since
I used a 32M (twice my 16M RAM) swap, things are running smoothly. I used to
post this question a few times, and get replies mainly on same reason :
run out of swap! Try it!

- wongm@latcs1.lat.oz.au (M.C Wong)
-- 
- wongm@latcs1.lat.oz.au