Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!ukma!cbosgd!mtune!bakerst!cgh!manta!brant
From: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes)
Newsgroups: unix-pc.general
Subject: More memory or more swap space?
Message-ID: <329@manta.UUCP>
Date: 2 Jan 88 07:49:51 GMT
Reply-To: brant@manta.UUCP (Brant Cheikes)
Organization: Soul of the Gnu Machine, Philadelphia
Lines: 22

I just finished building 3B1 Kyoto Common Lisp (thanks to eer@ritcv).
It works fine and seems to conform to Steele's CLtL specs.

Unfortunately, it eats memory.  The load image (before user programs)
is ~1.5Mb.  Thus it's easy to run out of swap space, esp. when running
KCL and Gnu Emacs together.  Some facts: I've got 2MB RAM, and the
disk is configured for multiuser.

I know I can increase swap space at the cost of less file space (tho I
can't remember how :-().  But I'm curious: would increasing physical
memory help?  On the one hand, it would seem that with more memory,
less of KCL would be paged out at any given time, decreasing the
demands on the swap area.  But if swap space is reserved in advance,
based on the size of the image's .data/.bss segments perhaps, then
increasing memory size won't help.  I suppose it's more cost-effective
to just up the swap file by a meg or so, but I'd really like to know
how the system manages the swap area.
-- 
Brant Cheikes
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Computer and Information Science
ARPA: brant@linc.cis.upenn.edu, UUCP: ...drexel!manta!brant