Re: [gentoo-user] OT How many GB for / partition?

2006-02-23 Thread jarry
Uwe Thiem [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 There are too damn many myths about swap out there. Like this one:
 Always configure twice as much swap as you have ram. Why?

OT
Well, it depends on how swap is handled by system. In linux, your
total memory = physical memory + swap (as you wrote)

A couple years ago I got answer from HP, where they said with hp-ux:
total memory = physical memory + (swap - physical memory)
only if swap  physical memory !

and
total memory = physical memory
if swap  physical memory
(in other words, it was completely useless to have swap  phys.memory,
 and optimum was really swap = 2 * physical memory)

They explained to me, that hp-ux 11 (or at least that early version)
allocates part of swap of the same size as physical memory and mirrors
the whole image of ram into swap for performance reasons: when more
memory is needed, it can be immediatelly made free, because it is
already paged to disk. 

So when I had 1GB RAM and 2GB swap, even right after system boot-up
only 1GB of swap were free (in the other half of swap there was already
mirror of physical memory), and I could not start any process which
needed more than 2GB total memory.

It seemed to me to be a complete vaste, and I was really angry, because
it was time when 4 GB disk was a luxury (and e.g. irix did not have
this strange feature). But things might have changed since then...
/OT

Jarry

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Re: [gentoo-user] OT How many GB for / partition?

2006-02-23 Thread Andrei Slavoiu
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 A couple years ago I got answer from HP, where they
 said with hp-ux:
 total memory = physical memory + (swap - physical
 memory)
This of course is equivalent to:
total memory = swap
I'm not sure, but I think Windows NT also uses this.
So practicaly the will be no memory allocation, but
swap allocation. And the RAM is used just as cache
(for either files or swap).

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