Kevin Kinsey wrote:
Frank J. Laszlo wrote:
Michael Tuchman wrote:
I am running freeBSD 5.4 stable on a P133 box with 128 Mb ram.
Although I don't think I'm overloading the system, it seems that
my system is using virtual memory too often. Admittedly, this
is a subjective question where 'too often' means only 'more often
than I remember with other *nix-like operating environments on
even weaker machines'.
Without some clue as to what the system is doing, IMHO it's difficult
for anyone to speculate why you'd be "swapping" so much. FreeBSD
uses all the memory it has because the designers know that "free
memory is wasted memory" ... I don't know where that statement
originated, but you'll hear it from FreeBSD programmers if you keep
your ears open.
One possibility is that you have actually configured **too much swap
space** (Joshua Coombs, http://www.bsdnews.org/03/tuning.pdf).
I'd also have to say that I'd consider this box to be a tad slow for
a workstation unless your graphical environment was rather lightweight.
I've tried GNOME2 on an AMD K6-2 475 with 128 MB and it just
crawled. It's slightly better with XFCE, but to get much performance
from a box like that I'd recommend black/fluxbox or something equally
easy on the resources. If this isn't a graphical environment, then
something *is* wrong, I'd think.
Can anybody offer advice on memory management, appropriate
places to read in the documentation, or other useful links?
Advice: with 128MB of RAM, don't open 127MB PDF files </rimshot>
Reading: Chapter 2 of McCusick's "Design & Implementation":
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/design-44bsd/index.html
and tuning(7) are a couple of canonical resources. Google is always
your friend, also. I apologize if that seems like "RTFM, newb"; it's
just
that IANAE and don't play one on the Internet, either.
I realize that the answer is 'it depends', so what I am asking is
really
* How can I find out if I change this annoying behavior for the better?
Experiment? Add RAM; take away RAM; add more swap; take away some
swap.
Of course, not all of those could be called exactly 'trivial' to the
system.
* Would upgrading to 6.0 help?
Possibly, but without knowing the cause it's hard to say for sure;
IOW, no silver bullet there.
This is an experimental box only. There is no critical data on it,
so data loss is not an issue when considering options.
The 5.x series was a "transition" release, to ease the pain between
4.x and 6.x.
Hmm, I wonder. 4.X to 5.X wasn't completely "painless", (at least, you
had to take some pains to get it right), so I might contest this. Any
further discussion or speculation on this would place this posting in
the political rather than technical realm, which I am loathe to do. For
one reason or another, 6.X is out. 6.X is good. AFAIAC, 5.X was also
good and 4.X was good too.
I would recommend going up to 6.0 (or 6.1, But I have not
yet tested it) Doing a fresh install would probably be in your best
interest.
The transition from 5.4 to 6.X is quite trivial; the only reason a
"fresh install" might benefit is if the OP has too much swap and
wants to configure less during slicing.
It's also possible that doing a fresh install of 6.0 would fix the
problem, but teach us nothing about the situation we'd hoped
to learn from??
I suggested a fresh install due to the fact that 6.0 has improved FS
support. Including multi threading capabilities. And yes, the upgrade
from 4.x -> 5.x was a PITA, But imagine the pain involved with a 4.x ->
6.x upgrade. ;)
-Frank
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