<quote who="Jimmy">
> That's kind of odd, since I believe the old phantom only had 96 MB RAM.
>  And that was running Oracle! Am I remembering it wrong? What is taking
> so much memory now?

You are remembering correctly. One time on the old Phantom I ran
ApacheBench for a few minutes to test our web-site code. It cranked the
swap usage up so high that the load average stayed above 4 for over an
hour. I was afraid I had brought the system to its knees. It kept on
trucking: Phantom was tough.

One of the reasons we are using so much memory now is that we are storing
a lot of data in MySQL to make MUG more portable (images, resumes, etc).
This requires that mysqld run with a biggger memory footprint (since the
max_packet_size is higher). Right now the system is using 75Mb (plus 45Mb
cached). You can check out the sysinfo here: http://phantom.byu.edu/

The added RAM will serve as a buffer for high load. If you hit the site
with ab, or open simultaneous ftp downloads, or run several apt updates,
we'll begin to use that extra RAM. Also, if it's barely enough now, how
long will it really last? The old Phantom lasted (by carbon dating)
roughly 5 years. That was a sturdy machine. We'd like this one to serve
with similar longevity.

By the way, is there a way to tell how much memory a process tree is using
(like 'ps afx' with memory totals)?

--Dave



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