What is a "sane" setting for maxdsize when running amd64? it seems many normal suggestions do not apply.

[Chuck Swiger]

On Aug 22, 2007, at 3:53 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> Chuck Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> writes:
>> You should configure squid to use no more than about 60 - 70% of the
>> available physical RAM-- ie, set the cache_mem parameter to about 2.5
>> or 3GB.
>
> Better yet, don't run Squid at all.  It was designed for a computer
> architecture that was already obsolete when Squid was first written.

This could be said of a lot of software, including many Unix  
flavors.  :-)

I can think of several things to criticise about Squid-- a config  
file which falls between Apache's httpd.conf and a sendmail.cf in  
terms of complexity is probably close to the top of my list, but for  
the simple purpose of saving limited network bandwidth using on-disk  
or in-memory caching, squid does just fine.  I'd be happy to look at  
Varnish when I get a chance, though.

>> It wouldn't be unreasonable to limit datasize to 3 GB on such a
>> machine, assuming that nothing you run will ever need to grow
>> larger...
>
> ...actually, maxdsiz is meaningless in FreeBSD 7, because the new
> allocator uses mmap(2) instead of brk(2) / sbrk(2), so malloc() counts
> towards the resident set size (ulimit -m), not the data segment size
> (ulimit -d).

OK.  Nicole, the OP, mentioned "amd64", not "-CURRENT", but I'll keep  
this in mind for future reference.

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck