freebsd-performance Digest, Vol 3, Issue 1

[Terry Lambert]

User DERO wrote:
> Ok, a whole lot of talk about swapping and all, but any of you who have
> seen a new computer magazine knows that even common desktop PCs are
> capable of a couple GB of RAM. SO, if I am building a high powered
> desktop, or a medium sized server. With between 2-4GB of RAM, should I be
> partitioning my precious server space with a 4-10GB partition of SWAP?

No,you shopuld be swapping to a fileint FS that gets expanded
automatically, as needed, just like Windows and MacOS X.

Too bad it's not supported, and too bad that, if it was, the
overhead would be too high because there's not VOP to get the
FS block offsets, so you would have to go trouh the FS code to
swap, and it would be much, much slower.


> Since it is a large load LAN server, with about 2GB of RAM, should I have
> a good 5GB SWAP partition.
> And another question, since buying a couple gigs of RAM upfront isn't an
> option, but adding on later is, can FreeBSD handle a multiple GB SwapFile?

Yes, sort of.  Swap gets page mappings, and the total of all page
mappings is 4G on Intel (32 bit) architectures.

-- Terry