On Mon, 12 Jul 1999, Omer wrote:
> Small comment:
> The x2 rule doesn't actually mean anything now,
> as far as I know this rule-of-thumb comes from
> unices which will not use RAM unless they have
> swap to shadow it with.
That is correct. The "swap should be twice the RAM" rule holds true for
BSD prior to version 4.4 (4.3 and below). It is not true for BSD 4.4 and
SysV, as well as Linux. You can use this rule if you don't have any idea
what will be your total process size.
> Of course, in this case, with 32MB of RAM
> he could use 128MB of swap.
The system shouldn't be paging that much with 32Mb RAM. This
configuration sounds very reasonable for X and netscape. As usuall, adding
more RAM will improve performance. Adding more swap will not improve
performance, it will just let you run your applications.
I would guess that your netscape is indeed running out of swap, so it
would be a good idea to add some. Assuming you are not into re-partition
and install and no extra disk is laying around unused, I would advise that
you will do this using a swap file (rather than a swap partition). Purists
might argue that this will be slower, but it will do the job. Take a look
at mkswap(8) and swapon(8) for more details, but basiclly you should do
the following:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/extraswap count=100 bs=1024k
mkswap /var/extraswap
swapon /var/extraswap
This will give you 100Mb of swap (assuming you have a spare 100Mb on
/var). Don't forget to add this to your /etc/fstab so that it will be
added after each boot.
-- Yaron.
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