Updated 9.1 to 9 stable on an old PII with 256 MB of memory. (FreeBSD runs fine on this machine). After updating have been getting the following warning on startup: warning: total configured swap (524288 pages) exceeds maximum recommended amount (497056 pages). warning: increase kern.maxswzone or reduce amount of swap space. I allocated 2.0 GB of swap when I installed. This was not a problem in the past. Should I ignore this warning or do I need to do something? -- Michael Gass mgass at csbsju.edu
On Thu, 23 May 2013 14:55:20 +0200, Michael Gass <mgass at csbsju.edu> wrote:> Updated 9.1 to 9 stable on an old PII with 256 MB of memory. > (FreeBSD runs fine on this machine). After updating have > been getting the following warning on startup: > > warning: total configured swap (524288 pages) exceeds maximum recommended > amount (497056 pages). > warning: increase kern.maxswzone or reduce amount of swap space. > > I allocated 2.0 GB of swap when I installed. This was not a problem > in the past. > > Should I ignore this warning or do I need to do something?Do you ever use that amount of swap? Swap needs some memory for administration of which page goes where so it has a cost to increase swap too much. If you are swapping 2 GB on 256 MB I don't think you have a very usable machine, but I don't know the details of what you are doing. Maybe your swap is on very fast SSD. My advice would be to monitor your swap usage and reduce the amount of swap to a little more than you really use. Probably 1 or 2 times the amount of RAM. Ronald.
On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 07:55:20AM -0500, Michael Gass wrote:> Updated 9.1 to 9 stable on an old PII with 256 MB of memory. > (FreeBSD runs fine on this machine). After updating have > been getting the following warning on startup: > > warning: total configured swap (524288 pages) exceeds maximum recommended > amount (497056 pages). > warning: increase kern.maxswzone or reduce amount of swap space. > > I allocated 2.0 GB of swap when I installed. This was not a problem > in the past. > > Should I ignore this warning or do I need to do something?Taken from my /boot/loader.conf: # Set kern.maxswzone to 0 to squelch "total configured swap exceeds # maximum recommended amount" warning, even with maxpages/2 fix. # http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2012-August/thread.html#69301 # kern.maxswzone="0" Give the small amount of memory on your system, I would suggest using the above /boot/loader.conf setting, since your system is significantly likely to make use of lots of swap; decreasing swap space in your case seems downright silly. -- | Jeremy Chadwick jdc at koitsu.org | | UNIX Systems Administrator http://jdc.koitsu.org/ | | Mountain View, CA, US | | Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP 4BD6C0CB |