old P3 system

B

blah44

I have an older P3, 500 MHz 128 MB RAM, that I recently revived. It runs 9.2 well but very slowly. I am sure that 4-STABLE would run well but I would like to have something a little newer. Anyone have a recommendation for something between on this low memory system?
 
It depends on what you want to do with it. I've used an old P2-350MHz for a very long time as my firewall. It ran FreeBSD 9.x without any issues. I only ditched it recently because the machine was getting way too noisy. It certainly wasn't slow. But if you're going to run Xorg on it then you would need more memory. Probably the reason why it's so slow is because it's constantly swapping. A bit more memory can do wonders.
 
Yes, low memory and swapping is exactly my problem. I am not sure how easy it would be for me to get more memory of this type, or how much I care to spend on this relic. I was thinking downgrading could get me there for free! After all, it was never swapping when it ran 4-STABLE or 5-CURRENT.
 
I don't know if CAM CTL is still enabled by default in 9.2 and up. Check it out on your system and if it is, you may want to disable it in /boot/loader.conf:
Code: 
kern.cam.ctl.disable=1
This will significantly decrease memory consumption and delay "Swapping Time".

Other than that, processing power and memory consumption is quite the same on 9.x and older versions, so downgrading will not change much in that area.
I still had FreeBSD 9.1 (IIRC) on a 333MHz with 128MB of memory until its disk died of old age. :\
 
User23 said:
I can get 2x 512 MB SDRAM Kit Infineon, PC133 MHZ for 16,- € from amazon.
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For 16 euro I can buy, literally, a kilo of the stuff. Granted, there's no warranty and no guarantee any of them actually work but there's quite a lot of them in a kilogram.
 
Before buying kilograms :) of RAM or expensive ones from Amazon it may be a good idea to check which modules sizes are supported by the chipset.
 
Beastie said:
I don't know if CAM CTL is still enabled by default in 9.2 and up. Check it out on your system and if it is, you may want to disable it in /boot/loader.conf:
Code: 
kern.cam.ctl.disable=1
This will significantly decrease memory consumption and delay "Swapping Time".

Other than that, processing power and memory consumption is quite the same on 9.x and older versions, so downgrading will not change much in that area.
I still had FreeBSD 9.1 (IIRC) on a 333MHz with 128MB of memory until its disk died of old age. :\
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Thanks! That is exactly what I am looking for, altho with 9.2 it appears to be disabled by default. Building GENERIC takes about 4h5m with and without that line added (after reboot of course). Anything else similar? I could have sworn this machine built GENERIC in more like 30-40m total back in 5-CURRENT days. Obviously the source has grown quite a bit too, but still, it certainly feels slow, and I never remember this machine swapping quite so much.
 
Modern compilers do much more work trying to optimize the code. That's one reason why it takes so much longer now to compile world/kernel. Of course there's much more code to build now because the number of supported devices has grown considerably from the FreeBSD 5.X days.
 
A buildworld or buildkernel also usually rebuilds things that don't need to be rebuilt. If you update or rebuild often, leaving /usr/obj in place and using -DNO_CLEAN can speed things up amazingly.
 
SirDice said:
It depends on what you want to do with it. I've used an old P2-350MHz for a very long time as my firewall.
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Nothing like running mission critical service on dying hardware :) I would throw to the garbage the thing that gentlmen have and get Alix or Atom based mother board for under $100 U.S. if I need a firewall.
 
Oko said:
SirDice said:
It depends on what you want to do with it. I've used an old P2-350MHz for a very long time as my firewall.
Click to expand...
Nothing like running mission critical service on dying hardware :)
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It was for my home network, not really mission critical ;)

I would throw to the garbage the thing that gentlmen have and get Alix or Atom based mother board for under $100 U.S. if I need a firewall.
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That's what I replaced the old and noisy bugger with. Found a nice board with an onboard Atom. Passively cooled. It boots from an SSD so it's now my most quietest machine :e
 
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