thus Amadeus Stevenson spake:
> Hello!
> 
> I've got the summer off (at last!) from college

grats! ;)

> so I've reinstated my
> ultra5 with a fresh install of the latest build snapshot (HEAD).
> 
> I'm just compiling a few utilities (wget, screen etc) from pkgsrc with
> no other processes (and no X) running and:
> 
> Memory: 52M Act, 27M Inact, 456K Wired, 5744K Exec, 58M File, 1584K Free
> Swap: 128M Total, 3328K Used, 125M Free
> 
> Seems like the compiler is using a lot of memory! I don't know what
> "File" means, but the fact that the swap gets used seems like it's run
> out of physical memory to me.
> 
> What memory amounts would you suggest?

RAM is like cubic capacity in a car -- there's never enough of it ;)

IIRC one of my Suns (an U10 with 384MByte) started swapping building a
release only slightly. so ~400MByte maybe kind of a boundary, to swap or
not to swap. just a thought.

> Swap?

as soon as a machine has to swap it's performance decreases awfully.
best is to make sure the machine has enough RAM (which, of course,
depends on the things the machine should do).

> 
> Thanks
> 
> Amadeus (hoping to get firefox working under X soon)

timo