Re: why swap at all?

[Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon@widomaker.com>]

Fri, 04 Jun 2004 @ 13:08 -0400, Bill Davidsen said:

> But I fail to make my point... I want to limit how much memory is used 
> for i/o buffers, cache, or anything else which will produce memory 
> pressure of my programs. 

I would love to be able to limit this kind of memory use.

I've always liked how BSD works in this area, never using over a certain
amount.

I find the Linux behavior of using all memory for things like
buffercache is less than optimal.  While there are situations where it
helps, there are a great many where it hurts.

I frequently do work which fills memory with data I'll never use again,
and it makes things slow.

Desktop work tends to do this kind of thing as well.

> That's what would be nice with tuning, the admin can optimize what is 
> important on that system. I am usually happy with what the system does 
> on i/o, but I want my 500MB or so of programs to stay resident in a 2GB 
> machine, and if that adds a ms or two to i/o I can live with it, so that 
> when I change windows it happens now, not eventually. And I bet there 
> are a lot of others who would like better response to focus changes aswell.

Not only that, but I wish certain bits of code could be locked into
memory.  Generally any code and data associated with the user interface
should always be there.

It's annoying when a menu in X takes ten seconds of swapping to appear.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [javalin: an unwieldy programming weapon used
to stab a software project through the heart until dead]