*BSD News Article 87656


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From: scrantr@ix.netcom.com (Richard Scranton)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: minimum system requirements for freebsd
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 97 19:28:55 GMT
Organization: LDA Systems, Columbus
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For X on a 12-meg system, that is not nearly enough swap space.  I have
a 486dx2-66 with 16-megs running at about 30-35% use of 64 megs of swap.
I'm not surprised you are experiencing problems.  FreeBSD's malloc() is
optimized for speed rather than economy, so it will require more swap
space than you might expect.

> I'm wondering what the minimum system requirements for freebsd are? I know
> the handbook says 486, 8Mb (to run X), but I don't think this is really 
> enough.
> I am running 2.1.5-STABLE on a 486DX2/66 (clocked to 80MHz), with 12Mb RAM,
> a 1Mb PCI graphics card and a 500Mb Hdd (26Mb of swap) and I am continually
> having problems:
> 
> - When I use the java compiler and try and quit out of netscape, or reload
>   netscape, either the compiler gets killed or X gets killed.
> - Sometimes when I change screens (fvwm) processes get killed.
> - My disk seems to be swapping almost continually at times which slows things
>   down to a crawl.
> 
> It is fairly annoying as I'm trying to write an applet which needs to be
> compiled fairly regularly (about 1500 lines) and I have to reload netscape
> each time I compile.
> 
> Julian

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Richard Scranton - LDA Systems, Columbus
scrantr@ix.netcom.com