Re: Re: ENBD and swap

"Also sprach Jason A. Pattie:"
> |>The experiences of LTSP users worldwide suggests otherwise (and I
> |>personally had a client chrash about once a month until I enabled swap).
> |
> | :( I think once a month would be fine for normal use (heh, I crash my
> | kernel every few days), but a crash will only be a userspace crash due to
> | lack of memory, which will free up memory, allowing one to restart in
> | userspace.  My 8MB buys me something like init, X (well 800x600 - it's
> | an old laptop), a getty, inetd, and a couple more things I forget.  I
> | start the window manager remotely, so all apps are started on the
> | server, not the client.
> 
> Presumably, your 486 has swap allocated on disk space.  Those X clients

Out of interest, and as far as I recall, it has 4MB swap, on a disk
partition.  Sometimes I do extend the swap with a few MB of swapfile
(4MB), making 16MB in all.  The laptop has a 170MB disk, split between
linux and an old copy of dos, about 50/50.  The "/home" partition is the
msdos one, of type umsdos.

Much is compressed, using various compression techniques.

> actually require memory on the 486 X server to display the widgets and
> the icons and the background, etc. etc.  If you throw a Mozilla window
> or an OpenOffice window at your client, I can almost guarantee that it
> will be forced to swap in that situation. 

Nevertheless, the X server on my 486 runs fine in 12-16MB total,
including swap.

> 32MB RAM is just barely not
> enough to handle the above apps and a full blown desktop like KDE.  64MB

Maybe not - I'm not using one. I use fvwm2 on it.

> seems to be the sweet spot, and ~128MB you shouldn't run into any
> problems whatsoever, of course based on how many windows you have open
> and whether you are running any local applications on the thin client, etc.

OK. I will believe that!

Thanks.

Peter