I just upgraded my PC from 2GB to 3GB of RAM. What would be
the best way to take advantage of this much memory in Slackware?

Would it make sense to devote a gig to /tmp and swap? Not that I
expect swap to ever be used; the only real advantage would be to
free up a partition.

Usage details: Single user multiboot (FreeDOS/Win2K/Slackware)
system, used mostly for assemply language programming, text editing,
and acesssing email/newsgroups/www. 80% of the time I use console,
20% X/KDE. I have never used anywhere near a gig of RAM under
Slackware.

System details: Compaq Proliant 5500R, 3GB RAM, 50GB 12-disk SCSI
RAID Array with 40GB free, quad Pentium Pro processors with 1GB
cache each. (This sort of system is going for a couple of hundred
bucks on eBay and is a real screamer when running Slackware)




--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer and Project Manager. Remember
Doc Brown from the _Back to the Future_ movies? Do you have a
"challenging" engineering project that only an expert like Doc
Brown can solve? See my resume at [ http://www.guymacon.com ].

Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com> wrote:
>
> I just upgraded my PC from 2GB to 3GB of RAM. What would be
> the best way to take advantage of this much memory in Slackware?
>
> Would it make sense to devote a gig to /tmp and swap? Not that I
> expect swap to ever be used; the only real advantage would be to
> free up a partition.
I think a swap ram drive is a waste, you can always have
a very small swap partition or none ar all. if you burn
a lot of CD's maybe a 750+ mb /tmp or use a ram /tmp for
big s/w projects if you trust your power or have a ups.
Otherwise I let the system use the mem for buffer/cache

<snip nice sys specs>

enjoy!
Jack

--
"They that can give up essential | remove 'SPAMisBAD' from
liberty to obtain a little temporary | email address
safety deserve neither liberty nor |
safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 |

Guy Macon wrote:
> I just upgraded my PC from 2GB to 3GB of RAM. What would be
> the best way to take advantage of this much memory in Slackware?

Don't worry, be happy.
>
> Would it make sense to devote a gig to /tmp and swap? Not that I
> expect swap to ever be used; the only real advantage would be to
> free up a partition.

Nope, the chances of the thing ever swapping are somewhere between zero
and none. /tmp actually gets used to store things (look and see what's
there), but you probably don't want that stuff sitting in RAM (doesn't
buy you much of anything). Set your swap partition to 2x RAM and don't
worry about it.
>
> Usage details: Single user multiboot (FreeDOS/Win2K/Slackware)
> system, used mostly for assemply language programming, text editing,
> and acesssing email/newsgroups/www. 80% of the time I use console,
> 20% X/KDE. I have never used anywhere near a gig of RAM under
> Slackware.

You could throw, oh, DB2, Informix, Mathematica, NASTRAN or Oracle on it
and you'll see some use -- otherwise, it's just sitting there happly
mumbling to itself. It ain't broke, don't try to fix it.
>
> System details: Compaq Proliant 5500R, 3GB RAM, 50GB 12-disk SCSI
> RAID Array with 40GB free, quad Pentium Pro processors with 1GB
> cache each. (This sort of system is going for a couple of hundred
> bucks on eBay and is a real screamer when running Slackware)
>
>
>
>

Thomas Ronayne wrote:
> buy you much of anything). Set your swap partition to 2x RAM and don't
> worry about it.

huh? why waste 6GB of useful diskspace on swap that's not ever going to be
used? if i had 3GB of RAM i'd probably figure out how to configure my
system without swap, or set up half a gig or something. but certainly non
6...

--
Joost Kremers
since when is vi an editor? a discussion on vi belongs in
comp.tools.unusable or something... ;-)

Joost Kremers wrote:
> Thomas Ronayne wrote:
>
>>buy you much of anything). Set your swap partition to 2x RAM and don't
>>worry about it.
>
>
> huh? why waste 6GB of useful diskspace on swap that's not ever going to be
> used? if i had 3GB of RAM i'd probably figure out how to configure my
> system without swap, or set up half a gig or something. but certainly non
> 6...
>
Better safe that sorry? At the price of a gigabyte nowadays, who cares
all that much. 'Sides, if you do something humunguous (like you can if
you're an engineer doing things like Mathematica or running a big
honking data base application -- both can allocate large amounts of
shared memory), it's just a cheap insurance policy -- I realize this
fella isn't doing that sort of stuff (yet), but, well, off you can take,
on you can't put.

Joost Kremers <joostkremers@yahoo.com> says...
>
>Thomas Ronayne wrote:
>
>> buy you much of anything). Set your swap partition to 2x RAM and don't
>> worry about it.
>
>huh? why waste 6GB of useful diskspace on swap that's not ever going to be
>used? if i had 3GB of RAM i'd probably figure out how to configure my
>system without swap, or set up half a gig or something. but certainly non
>6...

It's a matter of managing resources that are much larger than required.
I have saved every bit of engineering work that I have ever done since
I graduated from a COSMOS ELF to a Commodore C128, and I have every
software tool I need, and still I am only using 10GB out of my available
50GB (which I could easily afford to upgrade to 400GB.) So is having
40GB of filespace sitting unused really that much better than having
34GB of filespace sitting unused and 6GB of swap space sitting unused?
Or even 20GB/20GB?




--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer and Project Manager. Remember
Doc Brown from the _Back to the Future_ movies? Do you have a
"challenging" engineering project that only an expert like Doc
Brown can solve? See my resume at [ http://www.guymacon.com ].

On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 09:57:30 +0000, Guy Macon wrote:

> System details: Compaq Proliant 5500R, 3GB RAM, 50GB 12-disk SCSI
> RAID Array with 40GB free, quad Pentium Pro processors with 1GB
> cache each. (This sort of system is going for a couple of hundred
> bucks on eBay and is a real screamer when running Slackware)

A couple hundred bucks? Really? Jeez, not much for such a cool toy.

--
remove nospam. to reply

Personally, it looks like you might get your best bang for your buck by
selling the machine off to someone who needs that kind of oomph for
animation or video editing. I'm cheap, so I'll give you $50 if you pay
shipping.....

On Sun, 09 Nov 2003 09:57:30 +0000, Guy Macon
wrote:

>
> I just upgraded my PC from 2GB to 3GB of RAM. What would be
> the best way to take advantage of this much memory in Slackware?
>
> Would it make sense to devote a gig to /tmp and swap? Not that I
> expect swap to ever be used; the only real advantage would be to
> free up a partition.
>
> Usage details: Single user multiboot (FreeDOS/Win2K/Slackware)
> system, used mostly for assemply language programming, text editing,
> and acesssing email/newsgroups/www. 80% of the time I use console,
> 20% X/KDE. I have never used anywhere near a gig of RAM under
> Slackware.
>
> System details: Compaq Proliant 5500R, 3GB RAM, 50GB 12-disk SCSI
> RAID Array with 40GB free, quad Pentium Pro processors with 1GB
> cache each. (This sort of system is going for a couple of hundred
> bucks on eBay and is a real screamer when running Slackware)

Thomas Ronayne wrote:
> Guy Macon wrote:
>
>> I just upgraded my PC from 2GB to 3GB of RAM. What would be
>> the best way to take advantage of this much memory in Slackware?
>
>
> Don't worry, be happy.
>
>>
>> Would it make sense to devote a gig to /tmp and swap? Not that I
>> expect swap to ever be used; the only real advantage would be to
>> free up a partition.
>
>
> Nope, the chances of the thing ever swapping are somewhere between zero
> and none. /tmp actually gets used to store things (look and see what's
> there), but you probably don't want that stuff sitting in RAM (doesn't
> buy you much of anything). Set your swap partition to 2x RAM and don't
> worry about it.
>
>>
>> Usage details: Single user multiboot (FreeDOS/Win2K/Slackware)
>> system, used mostly for assemply language programming, text editing,
>> and acesssing email/newsgroups/www. 80% of the time I use console,
>> 20% X/KDE. I have never used anywhere near a gig of RAM under Slackware.
>
>
> You could throw, oh, DB2, Informix, Mathematica, NASTRAN or Oracle on it
> and you'll see some use -- otherwise, it's just sitting there happly
> mumbling to itself. It ain't broke, don't try to fix it.
>

You'll have to install/run all of them at the same time to see any kind
of dent in 3G! LOL

On Sun, 9 Nov 2003, it was written:
> I just upgraded my PC from 2GB to 3GB of RAM. What would be
> the best way to take advantage of this much memory in Slackware?

nothing fancy to do, really,
just let the system deal with it.

> Would it make sense to devote a gig to /tmp and swap? Not that I
> expect swap to ever be used; the only real advantage would be to
> free up a partition.
[...]

eh, what do mean, devote a gig to swap?
i -really- hope you don't mean something like, making swapspace on a ramdisk.
i know you're an engineer and all but even with that handicap you should
be able to see the fallacy therein. :*)

if you really want to free a swap partition, IIRC you can use
instead a swap file... but wtf is the point there, since partition
table space is not in short supply? similarly you might use
loopback filesystems instead of partitions, but the same wtf applies.

it -might- make sense to put /tmp onto a ramdisk, assuming you
don't have anything there you intend to be persistent. eg, X ...
and assuming you are doing something that might actually benefit
from a high performance temporary filesystem.

seems like 'ramfs' might be appropriate for this, as it is sized
dynamically as needed, but then again, a quick test here shows
me that trying to store a file there, sized greater than available
physical memory, will cause a severe lockup. that could be a
drawback. so 'tmpfs' might be more appropriate, safer, as it allocates
only fixed amounts of ram.

--
William Hunt, Portland Oregon USA