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From: Daniel Phillips <phillips@arcor.de>
To: Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com>,
       Lorenzo Allegrucci <l.allegrucci@tiscalinet.it>
Subject: Re: qsbench, interesting results
Date: Tue, 1 Oct 2002 16:05:15 +0200
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On Monday 30 September 2002 07:57, Andrew Morton wrote:
> I'll take a look at some preferential throttling later on.  But
> I must say that I'm not hugely worried about performance regression
> under wild swapstorms.  The correct fix is to go buy some more
> RAM, and the kernel should not be trying to cater for underprovisioned
> machines if that affects the usual case.

The operative phrase here is "if that affects the usual case".  Actually,
the quicksort bench is not that bad a model of a usual case, i.e., a
working set 50% bigger than RAM.  The page replacement algorithm ought to
do something sane with it, and swap performance ought to be decent in
general, since desktop users typically have less than 1/2 GB.  With media
apps, bloated desktops and all, it doesn't go as far as it used to.

My impression is that page replacement just hasn't gotten a lot of
attention recently, and there is nothing wrong with that.  It's tuning,
not a feature.

The sort failure is something to worry about though - that's clearly a
bug.

-- 
Daniel