> Actually, now that I think of it, there's only one time that I ran into
> memory trouble --- and curiously enough, it happened after I replaced
> tsx-11.mit.edu, Linux's main ftp server, with an Alpha running OSF/1.
> For a while, I couldn't figure out why my old Ultrix system could
> support more ftpd's than this very nicely configured Alpha. Well, it
> turned out the reason why was because OSF/1 had been configured to not
> allow memory to be overcommitted, and as a result fewer users could get
> Linux becaue the ftpd's were getting memory errors because OSF/1
> wouldn't allow the system to overcommit memory. As soon as I fixed the
> OSF/1 VM to allow overcommits, the number of ftpd's tsx-11 could handle
> (and thus the number of people who could download Linux archives), when
> up by some amazing factor.
I think that Digital's choice of defaults for this is very strange! I am
sysadmin for several AlphaStation 5/600 333Mhz. boxes at work, and it took
a while to discover the trick of removing /sbin/swapdefault (symlink to
the primary swap partition in /dev).
BTW, we have a program used for chip design-rule checking that routinely
exhausts memory on an Alpha with 1-Gig of DRAM and 2-Gig of paging space -
and this with lazy allocation! Combinatorial explosion at its finest <g>.
Steve