Re: 2.4 VM & swap question

Dan Podeanu (pdan@spiral.extreme.ro)
Sun, 17 Jun 2001 22:31:47 +0300


> Yes, I know there's no hard and fast rule for the exact ammount of ram/swap one
> needs that will always work. However, in 2.2 for a 'workstation' one could
> usually quite happily get away with having 128:128 and never have much of a
> problem. with 2.4.0 and up this isn't the case. This has been the cause
> of many people complaining quite loudly about 2.4 VM sucking and having
> lots of OOM kills going about. It's also been called an 'aritificial limit'
> since one of the VM people had a patch to 'fix' this. What I'm trying to
> figure out is if this problem exists linearly or just with 'lower' ammounts
> of total physical ram. ie if I jump up to 512mb and don't have a webserver
> or database (ie I've got 512mb so I end up with a big disk cache) will I need
> to have 1gb of swap just to keep the VM happy? Will 256 be enough? Could I
> even live w/o swap?

Probably you'd live with 512MB of swap. As for w/o swap? You need it
atleast to hear the disks trashing and know you have to ctrl-c the damn
process, if not anything else.

I have:
spiral:~# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 254572 89936 164636 0 4352 48016
-/+ buffers/cache: 37568 217004
Swap: 530136 0 530136

With X, netscape and a gcc running and doing quite fine.
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