Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread peter
> "jam" == jam   writes:

jam> On Sunday 19 April 2009 10:00:03 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
>> On Sunday 19 April 2009 00:16:35 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote: >>
>> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best
>> I >> can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x
>> RAM. Or >> was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?
>> >>
>> >> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on
>> how >> I might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on
>> my other >> partitions please?
>> >>
>> >> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about
>> it?
>> >>
>> >> Info I'm guessing would be relevant;
>> >
>> > Of course this is cockamany, urban myth, etc and typically you >
>> increase RAM and need even less swap than before
>> 
>> Actually, back in the day this was a good and solid guide, both for
>> performance and safety reasons.  Today, less so, but I don't think
>> it is quite as laughable or untrue as you suggest.

jam> From the days of my first system (PDP11, 100K RAM, 15MB disk)
jam> till today I cannot see why this opinion is held. I first
jam> encounted it as a RedHat recommendation. Pray wax lyrical ...

Standard (i.e., Edition 7 and later) unices used to write all their
memory into the swap partition on crash, along with some headers.
Then when you booted the system, the early code would recognise that
the swap partition was full of a memory image, and offer to dump it to
tape (or, for Kodak Unix, to 8" floppies!).  Then after you'd booted
and fscked, you could load the image into a file, and use the
crash(8) utility on it to find out why the kernel crashed.

For all this to work, you needed a bit more swap than you had RAM ---
and two times would always be enough (and it was a good enough rule of
thumb that made its way into the SCO system administrator's course ---
in the days when machine prices started coming down, and instead of a
central system, companies were putting in small servers here there and
everywhere; quite often the admin assistant or receptionist would be
sent on a course to learn how to set up or administer the thing.  I
remember giving courses in 1986--8 and they were full of women who'd
been told off to learn how to use and administer `the computer'.  I
taught them vi and troff (word processing) how to install, partition,
and format discs, add users, use chmod, use printers, set up serial
ports for terminals, etc (all the admin stuff) in three days!!! At
least they could generally type.  Niceties such as working out exactly
how much swap you needed were way too complex, so we told them, twice
your RAM)

Peter C
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[SLUG] Re: Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread elliott-brennan
James wrote
> Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM
> jam 
> Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:04:16 +0800
> slug@slug.org.au
SNIP
...and I activated suspend by dropping an earring
on the keyboard :-)
> 
SNIP
> James

To which Daniel commented:

> Daniel Pittman 
> Sun, 19 Apr 2009 10:44:09 +1000
SNIP
> My immediate response to that is "why would you bother?"
> 

After reading the header for James' post which is:

Re: Increasing RAM (Jam)

my initial response was, "What? More 'Black
Betty??", followed closely by, "Jesus! How big was
your earring James?"

Then I wondered what else you may have been
wearing and considered whether I should ask at all?

:))

As they say "Not that there's anything WRONG with
that."

Regards,

Patrick


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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
Kyle  writes:
> Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> Kyle  writes:
>>
>>> Maybe, but the last machine I had I ran LVM. I had a hard enough time
>>> remembering which volume belonged to which group belonged to which
>>> disk (and that despite naming them along the lines of;
>>> 'lv00Grp00Hda1', lv01Grp00Hda1').
>>>
>> My immediate response to that is "why would you bother?"
>>
> Being anal. Plus I was new to LVM at the time. 

*nod*  OK, that helps explain why. :)

>> The only case I can think of where it would matter are wanting to have
>> specific partitions on specific disk sets, for performance,
> exactly. That and local backups.

Mmmm.  Local backups?  As in, add another disk and use it as the backup
target?  That is reasonable.

>> Well, at the moment you have RAID 1 under everything except for swap,
>> which you have on a RAID 0 array.  (Implemented, in this case, through
>> the Linux kernel balancing swap space use when areas have equal
>> priority, as your two separate partitions do.)
>>
> Hmmm. If I think about it... My logic at the time would probably have been;
>
> If one disk in the array fails, then all data is mirrored. Yes, the machine
> might crash and if it had anything in SWAP at that time,
> I would lose that information.  Acceptable risk.
>
> However, with a single mirrored disk, and still a complete SWAP
> partition, I expected I would be able to restart and function on the
> one disk temporarily until such point in time as I was to rebuild the
> mirror.
>
> Are you saying that wouldn't work?

No, that will work as you state: a crash will potentially take your
system down, recovery will be fine.  If you have accepted that trade-off
then all is well.

A surprising number of people /don't/ consider that, and can't afford to
have the system go down, but still use RAID-0 swap. :)

Regards,
Daniel
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
jam  writes:
> On Sunday 19 April 2009 10:00:03 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
>>  On Sunday 19 April 2009 00:16:35 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
>> >> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I
>> >> can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or
>> >> was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?
>> >>
>> >> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how
>> >> I might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other
>> >> partitions please?
>> >>
>> >> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?
>> >>
>> >> Info I'm guessing would be relevant;
>> >
>> > Of course this is cockamany, urban myth, etc and typically you
>> > increase RAM and need even less swap than before
>>
>> Actually, back in the day this was a good and solid guide, both for
>> performance and safety reasons.  Today, less so, but I don't think it
>> is quite as laughable or untrue as you suggest.
>
> From the days of my first system (PDP11, 100K RAM, 15MB disk) till
> today I cannot see why this opinion is held. I first encounted it as a
> RedHat recommendation. Pray wax lyrical ...

Sure.  First of all, some of this wisdom comes from other Unix kernels,
under which virtual memory management was handled quite differently, and
in which it was necessary for the system to preallocate backing store in
swap for all pages in use.

Second, it also comes from back in the 2.0 through 2.4 era, before the
big MM rewrite, under which allocating sufficient swap was significantly
helpful to various operations — it meant that the kernel could manage
memory more efficiently.

Finally, back when a machine with 32MB of RAM was big it was quite
conceivable that you would run multiple activities with a combined
working set much larger than available memory.

Allowing those to swap deeply, when they were not concurrent, meant that
you could handle a good deal more context with reasonable performance.
Sure, an ideal system wouldn't swap, but a common one would — especially
at the hobbiest end of the market.


Oh, and it is still possible today to set a strict overcommit mode under
Linux, ensuring that every page of allocated anonymous memory has
allocated a page of backing store in swap — this works well for ensuring
that applications never receive a late "out of memory" error due to
other applications stealing the overcommitted pages from them, at the
cost of working poorly with applications that allocate vast chunks of
unused virtual memory.

>> > EXCEPT for 1 tragic circumstance: Never *suspend* unless you have as
>> > much SWAP as RAM.
>>
>> You mean suspend to disk, not suspend to RAM, right?  Swap is irrelevant
>> to the later, and the amount you need varies with which of the three
>> implementations of the former you choose.
>>
>> However, all of them require as much swap as you have *active memory*,
>> not as much as RAM — although, obviously, if you have no discardable
>> pages[1] then you need the two to be equal.
>
> If your active RAM is not equal to physical RAM then the systems is
> not doing ir right (your definition of active ram ?)

Pages that are not discardable, mostly consisting of anonymous memory.
Unmodified page cache, for example, is valuable but not "active" in this
sense.  Perhaps not the best choice of term on my part, though. :)


>> > Suspend writes all RAM starting at the beginning of swap and over
>> > everything along the way.
>>
>> No, it doesn't.  It uses the swap storage space just like the normal
>> kernel, except for adding some private accounting information and a
>> different header to make it possible to detect that it was used to
>> suspend to disk.
>
> OK it starts SOMEWHERE in swap then writes over everything. In any
> event I lost my home partition (root swap home)

You found an amazingly serious bug; which variant of suspend was this
with (or which distribution and release, from which I can derive that?)

Anyway, the suspend code is *supposed* to use the standard interface to
the swap space, or just the swap space directly, and will not run
outside of that space in normal use.


>> If it behaved as you describe[2] then it would corrupt memory on the
>> way through as it overwrote swapped data (and, then, no one would
>> ever report a successful suspend to disk. :)
>
> I never use any suspend and clearly don't appreciate the fine detail,
> but how would this ever work
>
> 1G RAM
> 2G swap
>
> VasttExtravagentApp using 1.9G of swap, then suspend-to-disk?

... think, think, think, fail the suspend process with an error because
sufficient swap space cannot be found.

In other words: this is an error condition, under which normal error
reporting should happen and the suspend will not run.

The general algorithm of all the suspend implementations is to discard
pages until suspend can happen — any discardable pages without concern
for swsusp and uswsusp, and as few as possible for TuxOnIce.

Then, write what remains to swap, then 

Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread jam
On Sunday 19 April 2009 10:00:03 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
>  On Sunday 19 April 2009 00:16:35 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
> >> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I
> >> can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or
> >> was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?
> >>
> >> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how
> >> I might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other
> >> partitions please?
> >>
> >> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?
> >>
> >> Info I'm guessing would be relevant;
> >
> > Of course this is cockamany, urban myth, etc and typically you
> > increase RAM and need even less swap than before
>
> Actually, back in the day this was a good and solid guide, both for
> performance and safety reasons.  Today, less so, but I don't think it is
> quite as laughable or untrue as you suggest.

From the days of my first system (PDP11, 100K RAM, 15MB disk) till today I 
cannot see why this opinion is held. I first encounted it as a RedHat 
recommendation. Pray wax lyrical ...

> > EXCEPT for 1 tragic circumstance: Never *suspend* unless you have as
> > much SWAP as RAM.
>
> You mean suspend to disk, not suspend to RAM, right?  Swap is irrelevant
> to the later, and the amount you need varies with which of the three
> implementations of the former you choose.
>
> However, all of them require as much swap as you have *active memory*,
> not as much as RAM — although, obviously, if you have no discardable
> pages[1] then you need the two to be equal.

If your active RAM is not equal to physical RAM then the systems is not doing 
ir right (your definition of active ram ?)

> > Suspend writes all RAM starting at the beginning of swap and over
> > everything along the way.
>
> No, it doesn't.  It uses the swap storage space just like the normal
> kernel, except for adding some private accounting information and a
> different header to make it possible to detect that it was used to
> suspend to disk.

OK it starts SOMEWHERE in swap then writes over everything. In any event I 
lost my home partition (root swap home)

> If it behaved as you describe[2] then it would corrupt memory on the way
> through as it overwrote swapped data (and, then, no one would ever
> report a successful suspend to disk. :)

I never use any suspend and clearly don't appreciate the fine detail, but how 
would this ever work

1G RAM
2G swap

VasttExtravagentApp using 1.9G of swap, then suspend-to-disk?

James
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Kyle


Daniel Pittman wrote:

Kyle  writes:
  

Maybe, but the last machine I had I ran LVM. I had a hard enough time
remembering which volume belonged to which group belonged to which
disk (and that despite naming them along the lines of;
'lv00Grp00Hda1', lv01Grp00Hda1').


My immediate response to that is "why would you bother?"
  
Being anal. Plus I was new to LVM at the time. 


The only case I can think of where it would matter are wanting to have
specific partitions on specific disk sets, for performance, 
  

exactly. That and local backups.


Well, at the moment you have RAID 1 under everything except for swap,
which you have on a RAID 0 array.  (Implemented, in this case, through
the Linux kernel balancing swap space use when areas have equal
priority, as your two separate partitions do.)
  

Hmmm. If I think about it... My logic at the time would probably have been;

If one disk in the array fails, then all data is mirrored. 
Yes, the machine might crash and if it had anything in SWAP at that time,

I would lose that information.  Acceptable risk.
However, with a single mirrored disk, and still a complete SWAP partition,
I expected I would be able to restart and function on the one disk 
temporarily

until such point in time as I was to rebuild the mirror.

Are you saying that wouldn't work?


It isn't, really: you could just turn those two swap partitions into a
software RAID array like the rest of your data, but RAID 1 rather than
RAID 0. :)
  

Ok. So how do I do that? But are you sure my logic above isn't sound?

TiA.

K
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
jam  writes:
> On Sunday 19 April 2009 00:16:35 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
>
>> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I
>> can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or
>> was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?
>>
>> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how
>> I might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other
>> partitions please?
>>
>> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?
>>
>> Info I'm guessing would be relevant;
>
> Of course this is cockamany, urban myth, etc and typically you
> increase RAM and need even less swap than before

Actually, back in the day this was a good and solid guide, both for
performance and safety reasons.  Today, less so, but I don't think it is
quite as laughable or untrue as you suggest.

[...]

> EXCEPT for 1 tragic circumstance: Never *suspend* unless you have as
> much SWAP as RAM.

You mean suspend to disk, not suspend to RAM, right?  Swap is irrelevant
to the later, and the amount you need varies with which of the three
implementations of the former you choose.

However, all of them require as much swap as you have *active memory*,
not as much as RAM — although, obviously, if you have no discardable
pages[1] then you need the two to be equal.

> Suspend writes all RAM starting at the beginning of swap and over
> everything along the way.

No, it doesn't.  It uses the swap storage space just like the normal
kernel, except for adding some private accounting information and a
different header to make it possible to detect that it was used to
suspend to disk.

If it behaved as you describe[2] then it would corrupt memory on the way
through as it overwrote swapped data (and, then, no one would ever
report a successful suspend to disk. :)

Regards,
Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  You do, in the form of all executable code, disk backed memory
 mappings, disk cache and so forth.  In fact, it is quite rare that
 discardable memory doesn't represent a substantial portion of your
 used memory, even if swap is in use.

[2]  Excluding the obvious circumstance of bugs in the suspend software
 that cause it to create serious corruption, which you may have
 encountered, especially with the more experimental versions.

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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
Kyle  writes:

>> First, this would be vastly easier if you used LVM, since that makes
>> allocating space on the fly a universe easier.
>
> Re LVM;
>
> Maybe, but the last machine I had I ran LVM. I had a hard enough time
> remembering which volume belonged to which group belonged to which
> disk (and that despite naming them along the lines of;
> 'lv00Grp00Hda1', lv01Grp00Hda1').

My immediate response to that is "why would you bother?"

The only case I can think of where it would matter are wanting to have
specific partitions on specific disk sets, for performance, which you
can rediscover fairly easily if you actually need to.

I also note that you don't seem to have enough disks in this machine to
make that a concern.


Presumably, though, I have missed something, since you obviously had
reasons for wanting to know that information.  Could you explain them,
because I would like to understand what I, um, don't understand. :)


> So this time I figured I'd simplify my life somewhat. I have all the
> necessary conf and data files, etc regularly backed up so if it does
> go down, it shouldn't be TOO MUCH hassle to get it all back.

LVM is only a convenience saver, not a backup of any sort, so this would
be good practice anyway.


> It is RAID 1.  And if I understand Daniel correctly;
>
> "... you probably want to match the RAID setup underneath your swap to
> the setup underneath your data devices. .."
>
> You mean I should have the swap spread across the RAID as well.

Well, at the moment you have RAID 1 under everything except for swap,
which you have on a RAID 0 array.  (Implemented, in this case, through
the Linux kernel balancing swap space use when areas have equal
priority, as your two separate partitions do.)

That also means that when a disk fails it will potentially take out a
block of swap with no recourse, and that you will have to manually swap
off the physical device to replace it.


> I'm pretty certain that how it is as the m'board controls the RAID of
> the 2 disks. I just installed on the one array for the OS.  Either
> way, it's too late now.

It isn't, really: you could just turn those two swap partitions into a
software RAID array like the rest of your data, but RAID 1 rather than
RAID 0. :)

> In short, on the advice of all, I just wont bother with increasing
> SWAP. I'll just dump in the RAM and see what happens.

That shouldn't be a big drama.

> What's bugging me more now is trying to get bloody Ubuntu to recognise
> and operate my old Linksys-Broadcom Wireless PCI card. But that's a
> whole nother story.

You might want to post the details somewhere, see if someone can help. :)

Regards,
Daniel
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread jam
On Sunday 19 April 2009 00:16:35 slug-requ...@slug.org.au wrote:
> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I can
> recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or was
> that approx.~ 50% of RAM?
>
> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how I
> might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other
> partitions please?
>
> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?
>
> Info I'm guessing would be relevant;

Of course this is cockamany, urban myth, etc and typically you increase RAM 
and need even less swap than before
for eg (my desktop)
Mem:   4036296k total,  4014656k used,21640k free,96400k buffers
Swap:  1004020k total,   32k used

EXCEPT for 1 tragic circumstance: Never *suspend* unless you have as much SWAP 
as RAM. Suspend writes all RAM starting at the beginning of swap and over 
everything along the way. (and I activated suspend by dropping an earring on 
the keyboard :-)

So if your use scenario has never used all your swap, add RAM and forget about 
adding swap otherwise do the math

James
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Kyle

First, this would be vastly easier if you used LVM, since that makes
allocating space on the fly a universe easier.  


Re LVM;

Maybe, but the last machine I had I ran LVM. I had a hard enough time 
remembering which volume belonged to which group belonged to which disk 
(and that despite naming them along the lines of; 'lv00Grp00Hda1', 
'lv01Grp00Hda1'). So this time I figured I'd simplify my life somewhat. 
I have all the necessary conf and data files, etc regularly backed up so 
if it does go down, it shouldn't be TOO MUCH hassle to get it all back.


It is RAID 1.  And if I understand Daniel correctly;

"... you probably want to match the RAID setup underneath your swap to 
the setup underneath your data devices. .."


You mean I should have the swap spread across the RAID as well. I'm 
pretty certain that how it is as the m'board controls the RAID of the 2 
disks. I just installed on the one array for the OS.  Either way, it's 
too late now.


In short, on the advice of all, I just wont bother with increasing SWAP. 
I'll just dump in the RAM and see what happens.


What's bugging me more now is trying to get bloody Ubuntu to recognise 
and operate my old Linksys-Broadcom Wireless PCI card. But that's a 
whole nother story.



Kindc Regards

Kyle

Daniel Pittman wrote:

Kyle  writes:

[k...@bottlenose ~]$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/md1/   ext3defaults1 1
/dev/md2/boot   ext3defaults1 2
  


Are these RAID 0 or RAID 1?  If they are RAID 1 then this ...

  

LABEL=SWAP-sdb2 swapswapdefaults0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sda2 swapswapdefaults0 0



... means that your system will fail when a disk goes bad; you probably
want to match the RAID setup underneath your swap to the setup
underneath your data devices.

Regards,
Daniel

  

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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
Amos Shapira  writes:

> I used to keep around large swap partitions (that was also before the
> blissful days of LVM2) until someone on the linux-il mailing list
> convinced me that the amount of overhead for the kernel to keep track
> of large amount of swap will actually cause a slow down and reduction
> of ram utilization.

You were, I fear, convinced of something untrue.  There is no
substantial overhead to tracking a "large amount of swap", and certainly
no "reduction of ram utilization".

Linux memory management is not /that/ bad, honest. ;)


What they may have been talking about is that having swapped two or
three gigabytes of memory usually implies that you will be thrashing,
where swapping a few tens or hundreds of megabytes would, historically,
be less certain.

> Also remember that the 2X or so rule was from Unix days when the
> memory management algorithms where totally different (e.g. Each ram
> page had a shadow swap page pre-allocated for it).

Actually, this has varied across Unix implementations for a range of
reasons; under Linux it was historically that way.

> So now I stick to around .5 gig, whatever the ram size is.

*nod*  As do I, save in the one case where I want to be able to use the
"suspend to disk" functions supported by Linux.

Regards,
Daniel
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
Kyle  writes:

> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I
> can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or
> was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?

As others have said, this was true back in the days when 64MB was a lot
of memory.  Now, by the time you are 8GB deep into swap you have spent
an awful lot of time thrashing...

> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how I
> might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other
> partitions please?

With fixed partitions, which you seem to use — although you didn't
specify the details — life is pretty hard.

Do you actually have some unpartitioned space?  If not, then forget
about repartitioning.  If you do, is it next to the existing swap
partitions or is it elsewhere?


Anyway, if you just want to add swap then swapping to a file is as
efficient, these days, as swapping to a raw device.[1]  Just use one of
them instead if repartitioning is hard.

> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?

I wouldn't bother.  Anyway, a couple of comments:

First, this would be vastly easier if you used LVM, since that makes
allocating space on the fly a universe easier.  Also:

> Info I'm guessing would be relevant;
>
> [k...@bottlenose ~]$ cat /etc/fstab
> /dev/md1/   ext3defaults1 1
> /dev/md2/boot   ext3defaults1 2

Are these RAID 0 or RAID 1?  If they are RAID 1 then this ...

> LABEL=SWAP-sdb2 swapswapdefaults0 0
> LABEL=SWAP-sda2 swapswapdefaults0 0

... means that your system will fail when a disk goes bad; you probably
want to match the RAID setup underneath your swap to the setup
underneath your data devices.

Regards,
Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  Technically, since a raw device is only ever one extent and a file
 may be several it is a few hundred bytes more efficient, I suppose.

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Re: [SLUG] Laptops with Linux pre-installed?

2009-04-18 Thread Daniel Pittman
Jonathan  writes:

> I remember that there was at some stage, soemthing with the EULA with
> Windows.  Essentially, it can only be valid if you voluntarily accept
> it, therefore, if you don't you can uninstall it, send the CD's and
> documentation back to Microsoft and they have to "refund" you the
> value.  Never tried it, or talked face to face with ayone that has
> tried it though.
>
> Any thoughts?

Microsoft amended their license to save the OEM the trouble of this; you
can now return the entire system, hardware and all, or you can accept
the hardware and bundled OS.  No middle ground, and no option to reject
only the software.

Regards,
Daniel

Seriously, did you think that sort of loophole would last?
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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Amos Shapira
I used to keep around large swap partitions (that was also before the
blissful days of LVM2) until someone on the linux-il mailing list
convinced me that the amount of overhead for the kernel to keep track
of large amount of swap will actually cause a slow down and reduction
of ram utilization.
Also remember that the 2X or so rule was from Unix days when the
memory management algorithms where totally different (e.g. Each ram
page had a shadow swap page pre-allocated for it).

So now I stick to around .5 gig, whatever the ram size is.

-Amos

On 4/18/09, Dean Hamstead  wrote:
> RAM is so cheap now, that if you start using swap heavily people just
> drop in a bit more !
>
> I tend to roughly match swap and memory. At least when i first install.
>
> Dean
>
> Michael Chesterton wrote:
>>
>> On 18/04/2009, at 10:02 PM, Kyle wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Slug,
>>>
>>> I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I
>>> can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or
>>> was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?
>>>
>>> Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how I
>>> might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other
>>> partitions please?
>>>
>>> Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?
>>
>> These days there's no hard rules about swap. The old rule was 2 x RAM.
>>
>> I don't think you mentioned how much ram you had or how big your swap was,
>> but if you aren't running out of swap, you don't need any more.
>>
>>
>>
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>

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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Dean Hamstead
RAM is so cheap now, that if you start using swap heavily people just 
drop in a bit more !


I tend to roughly match swap and memory. At least when i first install.

Dean

Michael Chesterton wrote:


On 18/04/2009, at 10:02 PM, Kyle wrote:


Hi Slug,

I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I 
can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or 
was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?


Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how I 
might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other 
partitions please?


Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?


These days there's no hard rules about swap. The old rule was 2 x RAM.

I don't think you mentioned how much ram you had or how big your swap was,
but if you aren't running out of swap, you don't need any more.




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Re: [SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Michael Chesterton


On 18/04/2009, at 10:02 PM, Kyle wrote:


Hi Slug,

I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I  
can recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or  
was that approx.~ 50% of RAM?


Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how  
I might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other  
partitions please?


Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?


These days there's no hard rules about swap. The old rule was 2 x RAM.

I don't think you mentioned how much ram you had or how big your swap  
was,

but if you aren't running out of swap, you don't need any more.



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[SLUG] Increasing RAM

2009-04-18 Thread Kyle

Hi Slug,

I've decided to increase the RAM on my home CentOS server. As best I can 
recall, the accepted wisdom is to have SWAP approx.~ 2 x RAM. Or was 
that approx.~ 50% of RAM?


Can someone point me in the direction of an explicit tutorial on how I 
might go about increasing SWAP without destroying data on my other 
partitions please?


Or if I'm actually upping the RAM, should I just not worry about it?

Info I'm guessing would be relevant;

[k...@bottlenose ~]$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/md1/   ext3defaults1 1
/dev/md2/boot   ext3defaults1 2
tmpfs   /dev/shmtmpfs   defaults0 0
devpts  /dev/ptsdevpts  gid=5,mode=620  0 0
sysfs   /syssysfs   defaults0 0
proc/proc   procdefaults0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sdb2 swapswapdefaults0 0
LABEL=SWAP-sda2 swapswapdefaults0 0

--

Kind Regards

Kyle

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Re: [SLUG] Laptops with Linux pre-installed?

2009-04-18 Thread Erik de Castro Lopo
Jonathan wrote:

> I remember that there was at some stage, soemthing with the EULA with 
> Windows. 
> Essentially, it can only be valid if you voluntarily accept it, therefore, if 
> you don't you can uninstall it, send the CD's and documentation back to 
> Microsoft and they have to "refund" you the value.
> Never tried it, or talked face to face with ayone that has tried it though.
> 
> Any thoughts?

Yep, about 700 times too much trouble. My time is worth more than that.

I am shopping around anyway, so the effort of finding a machine with Linux
pre-installed is part of that effort anyway.

Erik
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Re: [SLUG] Laptops with Linux pre-installed?

2009-04-18 Thread Jonathan
Hi,

I remember that there was at some stage, soemthing with the EULA with Windows. 
Essentially, it can only be valid if you voluntarily accept it, therefore, if 
you don't you can uninstall it, send the CD's and documentation back to 
Microsoft and they have to "refund" you the value.
Never tried it, or talked face to face with ayone that has tried it though.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

Jon


On Fri, 17 Apr 2009 04:19:02 pm Meijer, Luke wrote:
> Hi
>
> I bought a Dell XPS 1330 as these came with Ubuntu pre-installed.
>
> Soon as I got it I uninstalled Vista then installed my Linux OS (opensuse).
>
> As they ship with Linux you can be sure the drivers are no problem, so
> nothing is stopping you from uninstalling the Windows OS yourself.
>
> Unless you want to save ~$100 by not getting Windows in the first place?
> Would be nice I guess, but shouldn't stop you.
>
> Luke
>
> -Original Message-
> From: slug-boun...@slug.org.au [mailto:slug-boun...@slug.org.au] On Behalf
> Of Erik de Castro Lopo Sent: Friday, 17 April 2009 3:12 PM
> To: slug@slug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [SLUG] Laptops with Linux pre-installed?
>
> Craig Ayliffe wrote:
> > If you go to a product and click on Build Your Own, their is an
> > Operating System option where you can select Ubuntu OS Preloaded.
>
> Found it.
>
> Its rather well hidden and the window logo to the left hurt my eyes.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Erik
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> http://www.mega-nerd.com/


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