On 5/31/07, kelsey hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

rbw wrote:
> That's what I was thinking so the notebook models I am looking at are
> able to go to 4GB of RAM... I am also going to take a stab at no swap
> and see if that can eliminate that whole area of concern. That is also
> why I am wondering about the impact of CPU(s) and RAM increases to
> overall system performance (I do realize I'm asking for a stab at this
> question as opposed to an answer certain so any speculation is welcome).

Having a lot of physical memory is definitely important, but having an
appropriately-sized swap file or device is equally important. Swapping
is almost a necessity in a modern system. It's no longer a way to get
stale pages out of memory, but in a lot of cases, a very important way
to get contiguous blocks of free memory back. Memory fragmentation can
be a big problem, no matter how much physical RAM you have. If you have
4GB of RAM, 2 GB "free", but the largest contiguous free region is 1MB,
then you really only have 1MB of memory free. That's where swap comes in
-- older pages are put into the swapfile and larger contiguous regions
are freed.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have regarding this. :)

-Kelsey



I checked my main host, it's configured with 6GB of RAM. With 7 VMs running,
I'm looking at 121MB of swap being used. I would "hope" on a production
host, I don't see 2GB of swap in use! :)




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Mark Schoonover, CMDBA
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