Disk buffer / memory utilization

[R. Payette]

I've read and tried the tuning man page ( i've gained 2-3 M on the 
wired ).

This is typical top output during a build process. It's running awfully 
slow because the system spend most of it's time swapping, while there 
still is that  14M Buf.

CPU states:  4.7% user,  0.0% nice, 13.6% system,  1.9% interrupt, 
79.8% idle
Mem: 29M Active, 5696K Inact, 20M Wired, 3208K Cache, 14M Buf, 404K Free
Swap: 128M Total, 68M Used, 59M Free, 53% Inuse, 4184K In, 2448K Out

   PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU 
COMMAND
10282 root     -20    0 74700K 27336K swread   0:21 21.42% 20.41% 
cc1plus
   193 root      96    0  4284K  1536K select 108:52  0.98%  0.98% ppp

What happened with 16-32M ram unix servers ? what's so big in modern 
unix that make it unusable on low-end hardware ? How do you build 
kernels that fit on a floppy ( mine is 3.3 M and I thought I removed 
everything that could be removed from the kernel config file )

freebsd 5.3rc1
p2 350
de ethernet card ( generic dec 21041 card )
ide 4.3G hd
64M ram
kernel config : http://massonerie.kicks-ass.org/kc

Sorry if it's kind of a newbie question. I feel that I'm overlooking 
something big not just finetuning

thanks for any help

>
> I would strongly suggest reading the 'tuning' man page - it's really 
> pretty good, and should answer some of your questions (maybe not 
> specifically, but indirectly about tuning some sysctl's and such).
>
> Which such a small amount of memory, you're going to have to work 
> harder at getting it just right.
>
> You should also mention what you are trying to make perform well on 
> this system, what version of FreeBSD, and maybe also the hardware 
> information.
>
> Eric
>
>
>
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> Eric Anderson     Sr. Systems Administrator    Centaur Technology
> Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>