Re: 2.4.8-pre1 and dbench -20% throughput

Daniel Phillips
2001-07-29T21:20:21Z

On Sunday 29 July 2001 22:44, Hugh Dickins wrote:
> On Sun, 29 Jul 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
> > Actually, I liked the fact that we could change the policy
> > of up and down aging of pages in one place instead of having
> > to edit the source in multiple places...
>
> No question, that was a good principle; but in practice there were or
> are very few places where they were used, yet far too many variants
> provided, some with awkward side-effects on the lists.
>
> I've no objection to one age_page_up() and one age_page_down()
> (though I do find the term "age" unhelpful here), inline or macro,
> but even so a lot seems to depend on where and when we initialize it.

"Age" is hugely misleading, I think everybody agrees, but we are still
in a stable series, and a global name change would just make it harder
to apply patches.

That said, I think BSD uses "weight". It's not a lot better, but at
least you know that the more heaviliy weighted page is one with the
higher weight value, whereas we have "age up" meaning "make younger" :-/

And how can age go up and down anyway? I'd prefer to talk about
->temperature, more in line with what we see in the literature.

But then, it's so easy to talk about "aging", what would it be with
->temperature: Heating? Cooling? Stirring? ;-)

--
Daniel