Re: Subtle MM bug

[Simon Kirby <sim@stormix.com>]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 10:47:57AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> And this _is_ a downside, there's no question about it. There's the worry
> about the potential loss of locality, but there's also the fact that you
> effectively need a bigger swap partition with 2.4.x - never mind that
> large portions of the allocations may never be used. You still need the
> disk space for good VM behaviour.
> 
> There are always trade-offs, I think the 2.4.x tradeoff is a good one.

Hmm, perhaps you could clarify...

For boxes that rarely ever use swap with 2.2, will they now need more
swap space on 2.4 to perform well, or just boxes which don't have enough
RAM to handle everything nicely?

I've always been tending to make swap partitions smaller lately, as it
helps in the case where we have to wait for a runaway process to eat up
all of the swap space before it gets killed.  Making the swap size
smaller speeds up the time it takes for this to happen, albeit something
which isn't supposed to happen anyway.

Simon-

[  Stormix Technologies Inc.  ][  NetNation Communications Inc. ]
[       sim@stormix.com       ][       sim@netnation.com        ]
[ Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employers. ]
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