memory requirements?

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On 2004-11-05 21:17, Jay O'Brien <jayobrien at att.net> wrote:
>Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>On Fri, Nov 05, 2004 at 08:49:56PM -0800, Jay O'Brien wrote:
>>> I inherited a 400 MHz Pentium II with 128MB of RAM and a 20GB HD.
>>> Is this an adequate configuration to run 5.2.1, or do I need to add
>>> memory?
>>
>> It all depends what you want to do with it...it's the applications you
>> run that take up most of the memory.  128MB is a bit on the small side
>> if you're going to be doing memory-heavy desktop work (e.g. running
>> mozilla, KDE, etc), but there are plenty of lighter-weight
>> alternatives to those applications.
>
> Good point. I am bringing up another (very capable) machine and learning
> as I go; I set it up with 4.10 and I now think I should be running 5.2.1.
> It will ultimately be a mail and web server.
>
> I thought I would bring this old machine (inherited from my 89 yr old
> m-i-l who passed away in August) on 5.2.1 to get a feel for it; I would
> probably not do much more than use it as a SSH terminal to connect to
> the other machine and as a learning tool to learn (or re-learn) unix
> commands. It presently runs Win98SE, had a CD reader and a NIC card,
> so I know it has working hardware.
>
> The bottom line is that 128MB seems adequate for FreeBSD itself?

I've run 4.X versions of FreeBSD with 64 MB of physical memory and a bit of
swap space for a long time.  If you are not hosting a heavy-traffic Apache
with lots of dynamic content (PHP or mod_perl), memory intensive desktop GUIs
or other stuff that can bloat the memory requirements pretty fast (as Kris
notes that is pretty often the case with this sort of programs), 128 MB and a
bit of swap space is probably going to be fine.