FilePro running on Unix vs Windows

[Bill Vermillion]

On Thu, Dec 16 14:00 , while impersonating an expert on the internet, 
Bill Vermillion sent this to stdout: 

Bad form to follow up your own posts - but some brain cells got
lost in /dev/swap when I was writing about one point.


> Some of the problems will occur during installation if you don't
> understand your needs exactly and just HOW Apple approaches things.

> For example you CAN make a separate swap file during install, but
> that is not the default.  The default is to create dynamic swap
> file under /var/vm.  While the client did not have enough RAM
> though he promised to pu in more - he was running 1.25GB - the
> machine limit on the G4s is 2GB - he run out of memory - and it was
> usually HTTPD or Sendmail consuming most - and then it would start
> creating dynamic swap files.

> This solves the problem that some have complained about of running
> out of swap space - but I have seen as high as 30 - thats
> THIRTY 80MB swap files.

And what I forgot to say was this.

The downside is that have a dedicated swap device means the OS
can access that directly.  With dynamic swap files there is at
least one extra step going through the file system to access
the swap file as a regular file.  Having many smaller dynamic
swap files may conserve space as they come and go, but the do 
cause a severe performance inpact.  I could watch the action and
when he got a lot of dynamic swap files in use he was not writing
to swap that often but he was reading from swap a lot.  

And swap reads are typically in the range of 1000 times slower than
memory reads.


-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com