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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!yeshua.marcam.com!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!noc.near.net!news.delphi.com!usenet From: John Dyson <dysonj@delphi.com> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: BSD vs. Linux Date: Sun, 13 Mar 94 12:58:01 -0500 Organization: Delphi (info@delphi.com email, 800-695-4005 voice) Lines: 27 Message-ID: <hi2v4OZ.dysonj@delphi.com> References: <1994Mar8.141900.2906@wubios.wustl.edu> <2lk1jm$aor@simpson-01.cs.strath.ac.uk> <CMK8E9.EM5@eskimo.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: delphi.com X-To: Steven Horn <buddy@eskimo.com> Steven Horn <buddy@eskimo.com> writes: >How much memory do you recommend to run *BSD?? For FreeBSD (this is NOT the official line, but my opinion) you should have at least 4MB of ram. System performance is not ideal especially if you are compiling things, but it works. X is sluggish, but usable if you do not start up many clients at once. At 8MB X becomes relatively useable (actually below my threshold of pain) and compiles become reasonably quick (especially because you can start using MFS to advantage.) During makes at 8MB the object page cache is effective and the system does not have to reload the memory segments for proceses so often. At 16MB for a single user (and if your load is similar to my development machine) you are in the area of diminishing returns, but when using X, the more memory the better. FreeBSD will page stuff out to the paging files before the system appears to really need memory -- so don't let that bother you -- pages in the system that are used whether they are currently active or not do get priority over pages that have not been used for a long time. It *is* possible to build and configure a kernel to run in 2MB as well as can be expected... But no caching of any kind is effective and paging and swapping will be the norm. I have brought X up in 2MB, but it is not usable in my opinion. John dyson@implode.root.com