Options available for using >4Gb RAM on x86

[Anders Nordby]

Hi,

I run a rather large Squid server on a Proliant DL 380 G2 (it also uses
ciss) with 4 GB of RAM. I recently upgraded to FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE and
Squid 2.5, and I put in some write cache for the RAID controller (BIOS
verifies this by claiming it now has Compaq SmartArray 5i+). I've been
running this setup since around 4.6-RELEASE and it's been performing
well (currently the record is 500 hits per second with only a small
penalty to the average service time) and it is as stable as it can get -
I've had no unexpected crashes or problems.

I may add another box into this for redundancy, but otherwise I sleep
well at night without it too.

PS: I run in web accelerator mode, and I have a fxp NIC. A stable PCI
NIC is cheap however, so if the bge driver doesn't work out for you a
temporary solution could be to put in an extra NIC while the driver
matures.

PS2: I don't see a reason to upgrade to -current or 5.x as long as there
is no RELENG_5, so I recommend to go with the latest 4.x RELEASE or with
a recent -STABLE.

Cheers,

-- 
Anders.