Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!oliveb!sun!hanami!landman
From: landman%hanami@Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Mach features? (Re: Paging and swapping to a removable disk?)
Message-ID: <75220@sun.uucp>
Date: 28 Oct 88 22:15:59 GMT
References: <12670001@eecs.nwu.edu> <3924@encore.UUCP> <3352@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <73838@sun.uucp> <4200@boulder.Colorado.EDU> <1294@edge.UUCP>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: landman@sun.UUCP (Howard A. Landman)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 24

In article <1294@edge.UUCP> jt@edge.UUCP (J.T. McDuffie) writes:
>We keep talking about needing lots of swap space.  How much do you need?
>On our big company system ( > 60 users) we have a swap partition of
>16MB.   If you are running on a single user system with 16MB+ of memory,
>I wouldn't think you'd need much, if any, swap.  In that case, the
>single removable disk is not a problem.

That's because you're talking about users who never do anything much
heavier than edit a file.  In the CAD realm, demands are much higher.
Swap space of 100 MB is recommended for the Genesil silicon compiler,
alone.  And some simulator people I respect have told me that any
system with less than 40 MB memory is useless for serious simulation work.

These requirements pale next to the requirements for image-processing
applications.  Some imaging spectrophotometers deliver nearly a gigabyte
PER IMAGE.  If you want to keep an image in virtual memory, you need a
gigabyte of swap.

My Sun3 has 12 MB memory and 40 MB swap; but I don't do anything too
massive on it.  There are servers for that sort of thing ...

	Howard A. Landman
	landman@hanami.sun.com
	UUCP: sun!hanami!landman