Thought I'd toss my opinion out... I currently run a system with 45 users. It's a PIII-550 w/ 384MB RAM, RH 6.2 w/ a stripped kernel. This machine runs apache/PHP/MySQL, Qmail, POP3, IMAP4, NetSaint, Snort, BIND, quite a few Cron jobs, and even Seti@home (at nice -20). It runs great! I've already had over 6 months uptime on this box, and only rebooted once so I could go from 128 to 384 megs. Even with the 128 megs, it ran fine. free -m shows a meg or two swap in use, but I think that's normal after extended uptime and by no means is there any thrashing. Only 140 megs are in use, 240 is disk cache. Absolutely great performance. 50,000+ hits/month from internal users without a wimper. I'm not saying don't add more RAM, I'm just saying you probably won't need it. As for swap size, I chose 2x the RAM when I installed the system with 128 megs(256MB). As for the room on the drive swap takes? I don't think I'm going to notice it missing from a 20gig drive. Especially since I don't do mp3's or pr0n (At least not at work :) That's my 2 bits. -Greg- -----Original Message----- From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of Craig White Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 9:27 PM To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us Subject: RE: virtual memory swap size > -----Original Message----- > From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > [mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]On Behalf Of KevinO > Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 7:51 PM > To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > Subject: Re: virtual memory swap size > > > Craig White wrote: > > > I am amazed at the diversity of opinion here. It would seem > that 2X is safe > > but not necessarily going to be the fastest setting. My > interest is because > > I am going to set up what is likely to be my first server that > will actually > > be serving a fair amount of web pages and it would seem that I > have to make > > allowances for this thing to keep running - even if it goes > slow by way of > > VM. It has 128M RAM but I think that it's necessary to upgrade > it to 512K - > > RAM's cheap anyway. I don't mind giving away 1 gigabyte of > memory over to VM > > if it's gonna help to keep this thing alive. > > > > The more ram the merrier. If you are thinking of running X and a web > server at > the same time (gasp), upgrade to more ram. > > Having a swap file, of any size, will not slow down your machine. Not > having one, > and running out of memory will mean a crash. > > So go for the 512 MB, and add a swap file for those 'just in case' times > ... > > You can always start with a 150 to 250 MB swap file and then watch the > box to > make sure you don't need more. If you do run out of ram and start to > swap, things > a r e g o i n g t o s l o o o w d o w n . . . . . but at least it > won't crash. > > Expect the amount of 'free ram' displayed to dwindle down towards zero > at times. > It doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have any ram available, the > kernel just > hates to see any extra go to waste. It will be used for buffers/disk > cache and be > returned to use as soon as the box has something better to do with it... > > Yes, this means more ram than you 'need' can speed things up since you > don't need > to load something from disk if it is already in ram. > > 512MB is a pretty large chunk of ram unless you are running a LARGE > load. > > YMMV > ----- I'm gathering that running Apache/PHP4/MySQL for imp is a resource pig. I play with it at home but I only have one user (me). Here, we may have 10-20 users online at any time. Thanks, Craig ________________________________________________ See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail. PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss