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On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, Rob Beard wrote: > Tom Potts wrote: >> It all depends what your trying to use the pc for and the loading of the same. >> If its only got a gig of ram then swap may be useful. Obviously RAM would be >> faster but if you hardly ever use over 1G - and a linux server (?) probably >> wont get near that unless you do some serious DB work on it - then swap is a >> better option than 3G of ram doing nothing or not a lot. >> I'm also not sure how swap works these days - in theory you can have a near >> infinite amount of swap whereas as 32bit system can only ever use 4G of ram. >> Tom te tom te tom >> > Technically, on Ubuntu at least and I assume other distros, it is > possible to use over 4GB memory on a 32-bit system, or at least it is > using a 32-bit OS with 64-bit capable CPU by using the server kernel > although I believe each process is limited to 4GB. A moden Linux kernel (2.6) can support up to 64GB of RAM on a 32-bit platform. A single application can only ever see 3GB of that RAM though. Need to move to a 64-bit processor to see more. I'm sure you can create ramdisks bigger than 4GB in such a system though, and run many copies of big programs > That's what I'm running on my laptop (Ubuntu Desktop 32-bit with the > server kernel), it has 4GB Ram so I can squeeze out the extra 750MB out > of it. Not sure if it makes a blind bit of difference most of the time > but it does mean that I can fire up the odd couple of gig Virtual machines. > > I dare say though 1GB should be plenty for something that is just > running as a squid cache. When I wur a lad... First squid cache I built probably didn't have more than 64MB of RAM. I remember issues with RAM and some motherboards too - early Pentiums (or was it late 486's!) had off-chip cache and although you could add in more than 32,64,X RAM, you might find that only the first 32MB got cached! My AAO has 512MB of RAM and rarely swaps - but mainly because I don't run enough on it to make it swap. My small PBXs have 256MB on-board, but 140MB of that is taken up by the root filing system (ramdisk), leaving a mere 116MB free for applications to use. Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html