Very bad latency on x86 desktop when a process is swapping: Am I expecting too much?

[walt <w41ter@gmail.com>]

Hi lkml,

This is most likely a corner case for the average linux desktop user, but
it's very annoying for me and I'd like to get a feel for what I 'should' be
expecting.

I track the mozilla-firefox-trunk sources from their hg repository every day,
and there is one place in the build where roughly 20-30 large libraries are
linked, all in one giant gcc command.

All those libraries won't fit in my puny 1GB of RAM, so the machine starts to
swap, naturally.

During the 2-3 minutes that all those libraries are being linked, the machine
is truly unusable for any normal lightweight desktop task like reading email.
The swap usage tops out at about 15% of available swap space.

I know the problem would go away if install more RAM, but that's not my real
question.

What should I realistically expect from a desktop workstation under these
fairly uncommon conditions?

Many thanks.