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From: Mark Salisbury <mbs@mc.com>
To: "Dr S.M. Huen" <smh1008@cus.cam.ac.uk>,
        "Dr S.M. Huen" <smh1008@cus.cam.ac.uk>, Kurt Roeckx <Q@ping.be>
Subject: Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps
Date: Wed, 6 Jun 2001 14:40:41 -0400
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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.

-- 
/*------------------------------------------------**
**   Mark Salisbury | Mercury Computer Systems    **
**------------------------------------------------*/