adding more ram

[Bill Vermillion]

While normally not able to pour water out of a boot with
instructions on the heel, on Wed, Dec 10, 2003 at 02:41  
our dear friend Mike Silbersack uttered this load of codswallop:

Just one slight addendum here.

> I'm replying because I want to answer your real question.
> <g> The notion of swap = 2 x ram is an old one, and is no
> longer applicable. (Some) older VM systems used very simplistic
> swapping mechanisms, which required entire processes to be
> swapped, thereby requiring large amounts of swap space. FreeBSD
> (and other modern OSes) page out to the swap file in increments
> of 4K pages, and do so in a flexible manner. As a result, you
> should always have *some* swap space to handle overload cases,
> but it's not necessary to keep any specific ram to swap ratio.

Systems such as the Irix I used before moving the servers to FBSD
around 1996 - reserverd swap space for applications when the
application started up so those needed large swap space.  Often it
was never used, but the design allocated it anyway.

Bill

-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com