*BSD News Article 47732


Return to BSD News archive

Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!lll-winken.llnl.gov!uwm.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!tandem!zorch.sf-bay.org!scott
From: scott@zorch.sf-bay.org (Scott Hazen Mueller)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: How many swap for FreeBSD ??
Date: 1 Aug 1995 15:44:06 GMT
Organization: At Home; Salida, CA
Lines: 26
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <3vli46$g3b@gazette.tandem.com>
References: <3v84si$8n0@news.ust.hk> <3vh3oj$q0v@blob.best.net> <3vipqp$suj@news.Belgium.EU.net> <3vjoh5$3gs@blob.best.net> <3vjq9m$h63@cronkite.seas.gwu.edu>
Reply-To: scott@zorch.sf-bay.org
NNTP-Posting-Host: 192.150.103.17

>A "I run X, and ususally two copies of gcc, and rn at the same time with
>N amount of swap" would be nice.

30M/97M swap space, peaks are higher.  My S3 X server is currently at about
7.5MB, the usual pile of daemons (system, internet and NFS) chew up <1MB each,
16 xvts (like xterm but a little more lightweight) at 0.4MB each, the shells
or rlogins/telnets running in each xvt, two xrns, an NNTP daemon, and all of
the X stuff is running under tvtwm.  I normally have a Mosaic running as well,
which chomps down another couple of MB, and xv, when I run it, is a real pig.

It runs fairly well in 12MB of RAM; I started out in 8MB, but that was pretty
painful.  The swap space is spread across two disks.  I started out planning
16MB of RAM and guesstimated swap at (guess what!) 2xRAM.  That was just too
low, and when I added my second disk (850MB Connor IDE $209 at Fry's, now $195
there) I added ~64MB more swap.

One of the things that complicates any analysis is peak usage, which is hard
to track and measure.  For example, I run UUCP and take a small news feed (C
News).  If I run bumping up against my virtual memory limit (like I was at
just 32MB swap) the various processes kicked off by the UUCP subsystem would
fail.  I lost mail due to procmail running out of space while I was running
xv, for example.  Now I've got plenty of headroom and space for future growth.

-- 
Scott Hazen Mueller | scott@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG or tandem!zorch!scott