Re: [cobalt-developers] RAQ 4 Memory

[Gerald Waugh <gwaugh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Harald Kapper wrote:
> the final answer from one of our customer's raq4-boxes:

> [root /root]# free -m
       total    used    free   shared  buffers  cached
> Mem:  948      436    512     181     265       77
> -/+ buffers/cache:     93     854
> Swap: 128       0     128

When you boot up a RaQ with 1GB RAM it will tell you that
It can not use 1GB memory and limits it to something like
860MB. Odd number I know, and I think it is 1024KB for MB.

Also, there may be a problem with 'tag' RAM. "cache tag RAM"
on the motherboard keeps track of a number of pages
(64M, 256M, 512M) If a page falls outside this boundary,
it will be fetched from main memory, even if the processor
or board had the page in the L1/L2 cache. This can make the
system run slower than it would with less RAM.

I am not sure what the 'tag ram' cache size is on the RaQ MB.
But, it may be a problem. Only testing with an application
written for testing this will determine actual results.

Also there is high-density RAM and low-density RAM,
high-density is usually less expensive, and RaQs do
not run well on high-density RAM.

Another observation is that we have seen some RaQs appear
to run well on 1GB RAM, but during an OS restore, using
big drives, the format md4 (hda4) [big-partition] the RaQ
would hang while calculating the inodes (lots of inodes on
big disk) entries.
Changing the RAM back to 512MB would allow the restore
to progress without incident.

So will a RaQ3/4 run on 1GB of RAM?
It appears to, but is all OK?

Gerald
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