>> I want to test how a program would run with a reduced physical >> memory. The machine has currently 4 GB RAM running Debian. I'd >> like to evaluate the performance of the system with 2 GB physical >> RAM. Of course, I could remove on of the RAM modules. But, is >> there also a way to disable the physical memory by software?
> At boot time specify the "mem=VALUE" parameter to the linux kernel. > This is easily done with grub at the grub boot screen by adding the > parameter to the end of the existing boot options. > /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-686 root=/dev/hda5 ro mem=2G Or without rebooting, or should be able to eat up 2GB or RAM by writing a little program (run as root, obviously) which allocates 2GB and locks those pages in RAM (a feature typically used to satisfy real-time contraints or to ensure a piece of sensitive information is never written to disk). Try "man mlock". Stefan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]