I also experienced the problem that the FR slowes down to a point where
it freezes when the memory consumption goes to the limit of the internal
ram. And this happenes quite often when using many programs.

To solve this problem i created a swap file with 64MB on my sd-card
(vfat, but this shouldn't matter) and added it to the fstab like this:

/dev/mmcblk0p3  /media/disk     vfat    defaults,noatime        0 2
/media/disk/swapfile   swap     swap    defaults                0 0

I know that swap on a sd-card isn't the best thing to to, but i didn't
notice any sd-card performance problems. And since i use this my
freerunner didn't freeze at all anymore because i never get close to the
192MB ram even when starting many programs. :)

Ciao,
     Rainer

William Kenworthy wrote:
quoted text
> On Sat, 2008-09-20 at 21:40 -0400, Alex Fitzpatrick wrote:
>> Iain B. Findleton wrote:
>>> And of course, the buggy software can hurt. Surprisingly, I activated
>>> swap on my FR and stability and periodic slowing have improved. Don't
>>> know why that should be, but there you are.
>>>
>>>   
>> The answer there is to run top while using the phone... you'll see that 
>> it's running at pretty much at the limits of the 128MB built in.
>>
>> Adding a swap file, while inefficient, will allow the kernel to swap 
>> unused pages to "disk" and allow more things to run, or at least lurch...
>>
>> 128MB is damned small these days... but then my first Linux box had 16MB 
>> of RAM, a 33Mhz CPU, a 100MB hard drive and a VGA card that could barely 
>> handle 800x600x 256 colors.
>>
> 
> Is there a reccomended or "best" way to run swap on a FR.  swapfile on
> the vfat partition (/media/card/), swapfile on an ext2 partition
> (/media/mmcblk0p2) or an actual swap partition (is the mounting of
> multiple partitions working reliably now? - used to be disastrous :)
> 
> Size: 128Mb or 256Mb (the "old" recomendations for Unix was always 2 x
> memory because of core dumps)
> 
> BillK
> 
> 

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