> Are there any ram dumping utilities that ignore partition boundaries and > possibly overwrite the next partition? I would assume that such RAM > dumping utilities would fail when the amount of RAM to dump exceeds the > available swap space. Adam, was this the point of your comment above? > BSD/OS and FreeBSD, if configured to do this (via sysctl), will dump to swap and then on reboot, if /var/crash exists, it will use savecore to copy the dump to /var/crash. If swap is not big enough, I believe it writes as much as it can (never ran into this...), but I can't imagine it would cross the FS boundary (these are utils that ship with the OS). I made the comment only because, if you are expecting to get a full dump, you won't if swap isn't large enough. I don't even know if Linux does this. We had this enabled when we still had support through BSDI - whenever something happened they always wanted us to force a dump and send it over to them (there was a program called "kanal" which would analyze the dumpfile so we didn't always have to send them a 512M or 1G file). > I just installed Solaris 8 on a system with 512MB of RAM, but suninstall > suggested 295MB of swap. A few years ago, Sun may have increased its > swap size to simply provide more space for its new Java based > installation program, if I recall correctly. In this case, increasing > swap space may not have had anything to do with increasing performance > or reducing RAM requirements. > When I installed Sol8 on my workstation, it had 256M (yikes!), and suninstall recommended 1G of swap (I took defaults on everything and just cruised through it). I've since upgraded to 768M, and this pig still eats into it: Memory: 768M real, 157M free, 326M swap in use, 695M swap free But Xsun seems to be allergic to free(), I think it's the pixmap cache or something - it's currently using 121M and mozilla (another pig) is using 92MB. Those two are the worst, but Gnome and Nautilus and Evolution are up there too - I'm about to switch back to CDE and pine, just so I don't eat into swap all the time. _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list