[luau] bootable raid and the MBR

[MonMotha]

I haev 512MB of physical ram and 192MB of swap on my desktop (from back 
when I had 64MB of ram...this hdd has traveled systems...) and it does 
fine.  The VM swaps out stuff that hasn't been touched in ages and uses 
what it can for an FS cache (which of course gets purged if anything 
needs the ram).

Core files (ram dumps) are written as files in the filesystem, not to 
swap, so this shouldn't be an issue.

The older VMs didn't get along very happily without somewhere to swap to 
  (in fact, I read where ifyou were on a system with no HDD you were 
supposed to make a ramdisk and set it up as swap...), but the newer ones 
seem to do just fine with ZERO swap.

Besides, RAM is cheap these days, swap space is now just a place to 
store sleeping processes and when you need to do something your system 
isn't designed to do.  Swap used to be a much bigger deal back when RAM 
cost 10s or 100s of dollars per megabyte, but now it's more of a 
non-issue in my experience (note I haven't made any "big box production 
servers", but you want to avoid swapping on those thigns at all cost...).

--MonMotha

Eric Hattemer wrote:
> I would try the 2GB partition, periodically check useage with something like
> the program "top", then add a swap file if necessary.
> 
> Limux actively tries to use the entire RAM, but my system hasn't even
> touched the swap file in win2000.  So it'd be silly for me to make a 500MB
> swap file.  The idea behind the 2X thing is that people think if you buy
> more RAM, you're doing so because you're expecting more useage.  And that
> might spill over into swap.  I would buy more ram because I want the same
> programs to run better.  So you really have to consider what kind of load is
> going on the server, then actually think about how much total physical +
> virtual memory you need for that.  The only possible problem is that I once
> heard that it might cause problems if the system needs to dump the entire
> RAM into disk, maybe after a crash or something.  So I've been warned never
> to make the Swap smaller than the physical RAM.  But that's the only real
> guidline to go buy.  1X all the way up to 3X or more depending on what
> you're doing.
> 
> -Eric Hattemer
> 
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