Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps

Mark Salisbury
2001-06-06T18:53:04Z

On Wed, 06 Jun 2001, Dr S.M. Huen wrote:
> The whole screaming match is about whether a drastic degradation on using
> swap with less than the 2*RAM swap specified by the developers should lead
> one to conclude that a kernel is "broken".

I would argue that any system that performs substantially worse with swap==1xRAM
than a system with swap==0xRAM is fundamentally broken. it seems that w/
todays 2.4.x kernel, people running programs totalling LESS THAN their physical
dram are having swap problems. they should not even be using 1 byte of swap.

the whole point of swapping pages is to give you more memory to execute
programs.

if I want to execute 140MB of programs+kernel on a system with 128 MB of ram,
I should be able to do the job effectively with ANY amount of "total memory"
exceeding 140MB. not some hokey 128MB RAM + 256MB swap just because the kernel
it too fscked up to deal with a small swap file.

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** Mark Salisbury | Mercury Computer Systems **
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