On Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:08:35 -0600 Dale wrote: > Grant wrote: > > > > My server is mainly used for apache2 with mod_perl. I would think > > that cache comes in handy. Will a web server pretty much always > > find something more to cache, or can you add memory to the point > > where everything that can be cached is cached? > > > > - Grant > > I have read a few articles on how Linux manages memory. The thing I > get from it is this, Linux likes to have data in memory first, then > it uses swap because it is more "organized". The last place it wants > data is on the hard drive. It is all about speed of access. Linux > likes to be really fast. > > I guess if you have 16GBs of ram and it only access say 10GBs of data, > then it will eventually have everything in memory and not access the > drive much at all. Same can be said for memory plus swap except that > swap is on the drive of course. > > I will say this, I have 1GB of ram on mine. I run a full install of > KDE and I have had 100 or more pictures open with Gimp and have never > ran out of memory. The most swap I have ever used is about 200MBs > and that is with it set to use a lot of swap. I think it was set at > 80 or so. With Linux, 1GB is a lot of ram. The only exception being > some heavy games or video stuff.
Gaming and video aren't the only reasons to need lots of memory. I upgraded my workstation from 512MB to 1GB so I could run BackupPC. Since BackupPC uses rsync to copy files from the internal HD to an external HD and since the machine has approx 3,000,000 files a lot of ram is used :-> The additional ram is also useful for vmware. Just my $.02 David -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
