Can 10M Buffer Ceiling be lowere?

r.p.demarco at att.net r.p.demarco at att.net
Tue Nov 30 19:27:17 PST 2004


     A technical question:

     I have an old NEC computer (c. 1997) running 5.3-RELEASE with
48M of RAM.  Getting a new computer isn't an option right now, but
I would like to get as much out of my memory as possible.
     My /boot/kernel/kernel file is about 3M, and from the initial
boot: 
		real memory  = 50331648 (48 MB)
		avail memory = 43896832 (41 MB)
it appears this kernel takes up about 7M of memory with one screen saver
kld loaded.  With a few unneeded services (cron, sendmail) disabled, I
start off with about 26M free after a fresh reboot with just root logged in,
running `top'.  Looking at top, I noticed:

                Mem: 4320K Active, 15M Inact, 12M Wired, 10M Buf, 11M Free
                                                         ^^^

     From TOP(1):

                Buf: number of pages used for BIO-level disk caching

     Actually, the 10M is after some disk usage (it starts ~6M).
It never gets above 10M.  Is there anyway to adjust this, to
(say) a maximum of 5M?  Yes, a new 256 MB RAM system would be nice,
but until then, I would like to avoid serious paging running xclock :)
Thanks,

     -Rob


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