20.6.2005 kello 20:00, Timo Schoeler kirjoitti:

>> 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.

File means cached file data. When a file is loaded from disk, it is 
cached
in memory, and when it is next accessed, all the data comes from memory
and disk is not accessed. Unless your system really is swapping (but 
doing
work otherwise), it is a good thing that you have no free memory: it
shows the OS is using it efficiently.

 > 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.

I've got mozilla-gtk2 building on u5 with 320mb of ram just now. I've
actually 75 megs free mem (but it jumps back and forth depending on
what file is being compiled) and swap is unused. And I've X, XFCE,
and stuff running at the same time.

Of course things might be different if I started to actually do 
something
else than just let it compile..

>> 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).

Having some amount of swap used does not mean the machine is swapping.
It could have just paged out some anon memory that is not in use. If
I look at top output of my otherwise totally idle alpha that's been
up for weeks, there's something like 10-20 megs of swap used. The OS
has just decided at some point that it needs to swap out something,
and there's been no need to swap anything back (think idle gettys
and stuff like that).