> On Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 05:21:58PM +0100, roberto@redix.it wrote:
>>
>> > On Tue, Jan 27, 2004 at 11:00:06AM +1000, George Michaelson wrote:
>> >> I decided the "2x memory for swap" rule probably didn't apply any
>> more,
>> >> and made my system have 128mb swap for 256mb memory. Until today,
>> that
>> >> is.
>> >>
>> >> last night, moving a 1.5Gb ghost image in via ssh, with some local
>> >> folder
>> >> activity in email and a browser, I had ls processes crap out with:
>> >>
>> >> Jan 26 18:50:00 dhcppc1 /netbsd: UVM: pid 1424 (ls), uid 101 killed:
>> >> 	 out of swap
>> >>
>> >> indeed top showed that the Swap utilization was extreme.
>> >
>> > What did it report for memory ? especially the Exec, File and Free
>> fields
>> > ?
>> > You may need to adjust some uvm parameters for your workload ...
>> >
>>
>> Like George, on my notebook I've configured swap at about 1/2 of actual
>> RAM (only for space saving):
>>  total RAM= 512 MB
>>  swap 256 MB (instead of 1GB)
>>
>> Please, could you explain to me the meanings of the memory fields you
>> mention? how to interpret them?
>
> "Exec" is the memory used by executable pages, "File" the memory used for
> the
> buffer cache. Both can be reclaimed for other usage, so if a process gets
> killed because the system is "out of swap" while a lot of memory is
> allocated
> to one of these types, there's something which needs to be tuned, or
> something
> broken in the VM system.
>

and, like this case where RAM > SWAP, what about do not using swap at all
(disabling swap, for example)?

could you suggest to me any link or doc on the UVM tuning topic?


Thanks,
Roberto