> I've just installed Plan 9 on a new terminal that will soon become my > new auth/cpu/file server. It's a [EMAIL PROTECTED], 128MB of RAM, and a 500GB > hard drive. I made a 10GB fossil and gave the rest to venti. When I > boot, I find that pretty much all of the 128 megs is being used, and > of course since swap doesn't work I didn't even bother to make a > partition for it. Besides the obvious "buy more RAM", do you guys > have any suggestions for reducing memory use? I have run Plan 9 on > machines with 32 MB in the last few years so I presume this must have > something to do with the size of the file systems--correct?
490 GB of venti storage is 900 arenas or so, and venti requires having at least two disk blocks in its buffer cache for each arena. At 8k disk blocks, that's going to be about 16MB just for those blocks, no matter what you set bcmem to. I haven't studied this in detail, but I think that if you made larger arenas (say 1.5GB instead of 0.5GB) then you'd end up with less memory usage by venti. That would require starting over, of course. Another solution would be to just use less of the disk for venti, since most people seem to use only a very small amount of venti storage. You could split the disk into multiple arena partitions and for now just use one, and then if you need more in the future you could turn them on as needed. By then maybe the disk will sit in a machine with more memory. Russ
