Re: RHEL 4 improvement in use of swap? (compared to RHEL 3)

["Stephen J. Smoogen" <smooge gmail com>]

On 10/27/05, robert infotility com <robert infotility com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> First of all I've used Redhat distributions for several years and
> Linux has been almost entirely a pleasant and productive environment
> for me. Thanks to all responsible parties for the hard work which
> goes into every release.
>
> My question is, is RHEL 4 known to be better at handling
> virtual memory (swapping in particular) than RHEL 3 ?
>
> I have an ageing Dell box (2 x 450 MHz cpu, 256 M memory) running
> RHEL 3 update 6 (last updated circa 2005/10/01).
> Today it was running several Java programs, Mozilla, and various
> daemons, and perking along OK. The Java programs are terrible
> memory pigs but GUI apps response to mouse clicks and command line
> response to keyboard input was OK.
>

The system has too little real memory for your tasks. The only thing
that RHEL-4 might have done is kill your memory hog application better
than the RHEL-3 kernel would. You are needing around 1 GB of real ram
if you want to do both Mozilla, java and a big compile without too
much swap time.

Sorry.

--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator