About a week ago I embarked on a mission to understand how much swap space I needed on my Mac clients. Initially I started a batch job that ran on the client in the background and collected data from two files in the /proc filesystem. I then implemented SNMP on the client and used a perl script running on the server to collect data from the client. It's been an interesting week. I found and fixed a bug in the SNMP code, and then found that both Netscape and Mozilla were causing bad things to happen on the client. (Shockwave Flash doesn't work very well over the net!). I also found that the client kernel wasn't handlind swapping very well, and that there are memory leaks in various components. Within the past two weeks, a new (nubus-pmac) kernel (2.4.13-pre3-ben0) has been released and it does a much better job. I also determined that the X server footprint is about 8 MB and the SNMP footprint is between 3 and 4 MB. The hang I was getting the other day was due to the browser getting wedged with the shockwave flash and consuming much of the network bandwidth. At any rate, things seem to be working now. 36 MB RAM Memory usage: Runlevel 3: 16MB Runlevel 5: 24MB SNMP daemon: 3.5MB browser: 3-4 MB So, after firing everything up I have about 5 MB free memory. When I ran everything locally of the HDD (doing X -query <server>) I could not force the system to start swapping with any mix of jobs I ran. However, as a network client, there appear to be problems with releasing pages after they are used, and the memory footprint continually grows. After 200 minutes, I got a timeout using my perl script, but with the new kernel, the client was still usable. Over the 3+ hours, I burned 15 MB of memory, so it looks like 100 MB will be good for 24 hours or so. Does anyone have any thoughts on what might be going on? --Skip _______________________________________________________________ Don't miss the 2002 Sprint PCS Application Developer's Conference August 25-28 in Las Vegas -- http://devcon.sprintpcs.com/adp/index.cfm _____________________________________________________________________ Ltsp-discuss mailing list. To un-subscribe, or change prefs, goto: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ltsp-discuss For additional LTSP help, try #ltsp channel on irc.openprojects.net
