Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Setting Disk-Management Strategy
Chapter 278
“Managing Swap and Dump” on page 662 provides some guidelines for
estimating swap needs, but there is often no substitute for running the
applications and seeing what happens.
Example Here’s what we did to figure out how much swap would be used by the
tools used to develop this document.
We booted a workstation (an HP9000 715 running HP-UX 10.01 with
96MB RAM), started up VUE, opened one window, then started up all
the applications one after another, using swapinfo (1M) to check swap
usage each time.
CAUTION The numbers that follow represent what happened on a given system on
a given day; we are recording them only to illustrate the method. They in
no way define the performance of the products or of HP-UX.
Running HP-UX at run-level 3 took 19-20 MB of reserved swap.
Transitioning to run-level 4 and opening one VUE window brought us up
to 39-40 MB of reserved swap; this is shown in the first row of the table;
subsequent rows show what happened as we started up the applications.
Totals in the right-hand column are cumulative.
Table 2-2 Sampling Swap Usage
Run...
Reserved/Used
on Creation
(MB) Activity
Additional MB
Reserved/Used Total
HP-UX/VUE 39-40 0 Open 1
window
39-40
FrameMaker 10 0 Open
document
1253
emacs 2 0 55
DynaText
browser
4 0 Open
book
1060
Netscape 6 0 Load
graphic
1067