On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 06:53:00PM -0500, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> Matt Herzog <mherzog@mediaone.net> writes:
> > I hit swap for the first time ever last night on my i386 box.  What I can't
> > understand is, I had not yet exhausted my physical ram.  In fact, I was only
> > using ~64 MB of ram out of 128 MB total. I have never seen this system use
> > more than 80 MB of its ram under any circumstance and again, I have never
> > seen it using any swap until last night.
> 
> The VM subsystem doesn't wait until you're totally out of memory to
> try cleaning things up -- it has a target number of free pages it
> tries to keep available.

How does the VM decide when to start paging? Is there some formula?
Solaris unlike NetBSD seems to start swapping the moment the machine 
is fully booted. Is there a way to change any default VM behaviors 
in NetBSD? 

> Also, you might not be getting perfectly accurate information on RAM
> usage -- what were you using to measure it?

I'm looking at top mostly. I know vmstat is more accurate but top is
pretty convenient.

Thanks Perry.

-- 
Matthew Herzog                  Unix Administrator
mherzog@mediaone.net            Powered by NetBSD