swap size and zombie

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jun 12), Chris said:
> Looking at a web/email server with the following from "top" ...
> 
> last pid: 29494;  load averages:  0.00,  0.00,  0.00   up 85+12:33:05  23:07:44
> 39 processes:  1 running, 37 sleeping, 1 zombie
> CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
> Mem: 197M Active, 545M Inact, 176M Wired, 51M Cache, 112M Buf, 33M Free
> Swap: 2048M Total, 184K Used, 2048M Free
> 
> Does it look like the swap file is way too big? The box has been
> online for awhile, yet it seems like the swap file is not utilized
> very much at all. For that matter, the server is clearly overpowered
> for what it does, but better than underpowered I suppose.

Sysinstall defaults to creating a swap partition that is 2x RAM, but
for large-memory systems it's usually overkill (do you really plan on
running 3gb worth of processes in a 1gb system?).  1x RAM is the
minimum if you want to be able to save kernel crashdumps though, so it
may be useful if you ever double the RAM in the box.
 
> Also, I cannot seem to get rid of that zombie... it happens at boot time:
> 
> root       0  0.0  0.0     0    0  ??  ZW   -         0:00.00  (perl)

Run ps axl, find the parent process (PPID column), and fix the bug in it :)

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com