On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, David Given wrote: > I have a machine with 48MB of RAM that I want to use as a server. > > The OpenBSD kernel is a bit over 5MB. I assume that gets loaded into memory > and is not swappable, giving me 43MB left, which isn't a lot.
I sent a longer ramble offlist, but onlist, the bottom line is this: you'll save some memory, a few megabytes, but if they are the tipping point between usefulness and non-usefulness of the machine, spend your time and money on Ebay, finding more memory. Sometimes you can find a couple of hundred MB for cheap, with a faster CPU, large discs, snappy ethernet and video cards, a new case and power supply, and other cool stuff still attached to it ;-). Other point: swapping (i.e. paging) is perfectly acceptable behavior in some circumstances. It used to be the "way things were". The Golden Age of cheap servers (and laptops and ...) is almost upon us, just as soon as the lemmings start going to Vista. Dave