*BSD News Article 48172


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From: thomas@ghpc8.ihf.rwth-aachen.de (Thomas Gellekum)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: How many swap for FreeBSD ??
Date: 1 Aug 1995 06:19:52 GMT
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David O'Brien (dobrien@seas.gwu.edu) wrote:
> 
> A "I run X, and ususally two copies of gcc, and rn at the same time with
> N amount of swap" would be nice.

From my experience:  16 MB RAM + 20 MB swap is too few if you run X,
some xterms, ghostscript, TeX, a make and maybe one more user on a
terminal.  It doesn't page too much, but virtual memory is exhausted
quickly.

8 MB RAM + 60 MB swap works for me with the same load.  More paging,
of course, but still usable.

IME, the biggest jump in performance was an upgrade from 4 to 8 MB
RAM (in the 386bsd days).  More RAM is nice, but if you don't have
it for whatever reason, you can probably work with 8 MB, if you
don't run really big single processes (number crunching with huge
matrices, image processing on several 1024 x 1024 pixel images at
once, and the like).  But make sure you have plenty of swap in any
case; 40 MB is probably the minimum, IMO.

tg