I, too, have only 64MB of RAM, and have never seen any memory shortage. I find it hard to believe that an OS upgrade would suddenly require so much more memory. grrrr.
Mike Horwath Admin & Manager @ Vector Internet Services, Inc.
-- David Denney | D i m e n s i o n a l C o m m u n i c a t i o n s | daud@dimensional.com | Shell & PPP * $25/mo 33K/56Kbps * $50/mo 64K ISDN |
The major reason we upped the memory requirements for 5.0 was for some edge conditions where many disk blocks were being dirtied at once. This happens mostly for deletes and resizes of very large files. Previously this would lead to deadlocks in the OS.
In 5.0 we've made fixes that work around many deadlock situations. Part of the fix involved increasing the reserve of free memory available for wafl to continue to make progress.
New features such as improved checksum computation offloading for Gigabit Ethernet and Multiple Raid Groups and Volumes also needed more memory.
So although we're now using more memory, the tradeoff is that the filer should be even more stable than before and support all the new features in 5.0.
Varun Mehta (5.0 Engineering Project Manager)