10.4 minimums

[J]

On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 14:14, Ronald B Cadby <RCadby at roncadby.org> wrote:
> Thanks J.
>
> I appreciate the input and you've sort of reaffirmed that I need better
> hardware.

That always helps... :-)

For what it's worth, the Athlon XP box I have used to run RHEL, but
Ubuntu seems to be far and away faster on that old hardware than RHEL
5 was.

> Is there a reference you could pass on re adjusting the /var space
> upward (or any other tips to improve swap space or whatever might
> improve my performance)?

Don't know what you mean by "adjusting the /var space"  That has
little to nothing to do with performance, unless you have a separate
/var partition and that ran out of space, but then you'd more likely
have issues with OS stability than you would actual performance.

If, for example, you have a 40GB hard disk, and you have allocated 1GB
for Swap and 39GB for /, there's nothing you can do aside from
installing a new hard disk... which IS an option.  In that case, I'd
do something like move /home to the 2nd hard disk, which will free up
whatever space /home is taking up on the current disk.

Otherwise, install just a larger disk and re-install to that... but
again, all that does is get you more disk space, not more performance
and depending on how you utilize that disk, it could degrade
performance (for example, taking an already slow system and throwing
the overhead of software RAID on top of everything else.)

As for swap space, are you using swap?  If you look at the output of
the command 'free' you'll see how much swap you are using... in the
best case scenario, you really should never be using swap space (swap
in Linux is not used like it is in Windows).  If you're actually using
Swap, you've either got some serious computing going on, like
rendering large images or video, or you're running more stuff than you
have RAM for. (that does not necessarily apply to server scenarios,
though, but even then you'd want to avoid the performance hit of swap
usage).

I've always considered swap more as an emergency fund than anything
else.  If you don't use a swap partiton and you run out of memory, the
oom_killer runs which starts killing off running processes until it
frees enough to meet current demand.  If you DO use swap, there's a
chance that the kernel will be able to swap existing memory pages to
disk, freeing up space temporarily.

Also, if you're using swap space consistently, then you probably DO
have a performance issue.

You can google for things like performance tuning (there are a good
number of sites that have info on that), but I'm more inclined to fix
the hardware deficiency first.  Max out the RAM, then start looking
for tuning.

What kind of system are you running on, anyway?  What kind of specs
does it have? Because, honestly, without knowing that basic info, it's
really hard to give a useful suggestion.

Cheers,

Jeff