> Anyway, I have this Sparcstation ELC which I bought for my personal use in a moment of stupidity. It has a 760MB hard disk and 16MB of memory. I figured that 16MB ought to be enough, and indeed, pstat reports that on a typical day, running Ecch Windows, a few Emacses, xterms, and the occasional xload or xclock, I run 12 to
13MB of memory usage, tops.
> But I didn’t come here today to talk about why 2 emacses and a window system should take five times the total memory of the late AIKS-10. No, today I came to talk about the virtual memory system.
> Why is it that when I walk away from my trusty jerkstation for a while and come back, I touch the mouse and all of a sudden, whirr, rattle, rattle, whirr, all my processes get swapped back into memory?
> I mean, why did they get paged out in the first place? It’s not like the system needed that memory—for chrissake, it still has 3 or 4 MB free!
That's another quoted email in the Handbook, from a Robert E. Seastrom, dated 1993! I was wondering the same thoughts myself — fifteen years later — about Windows Vista, and it later became one of the wonderful things about switching to Linux, which does not page unless is must (though this behavior is configurable).
(That said, when Linux runs out of memory, it can go on a Sisyphus-esque page-a-thon and die thrashing the disk about the interior of the machine casing. For all people complain about the OOM killer, sometimes, it's handy!)
> But I didn’t come here today to talk about why 2 emacses and a window system should take five times the total memory of the late AIKS-10. No, today I came to talk about the virtual memory system.
> Why is it that when I walk away from my trusty jerkstation for a while and come back, I touch the mouse and all of a sudden, whirr, rattle, rattle, whirr, all my processes get swapped back into memory?
> I mean, why did they get paged out in the first place? It’s not like the system needed that memory—for chrissake, it still has 3 or 4 MB free!
That's another quoted email in the Handbook, from a Robert E. Seastrom, dated 1993! I was wondering the same thoughts myself — fifteen years later — about Windows Vista, and it later became one of the wonderful things about switching to Linux, which does not page unless is must (though this behavior is configurable).
(That said, when Linux runs out of memory, it can go on a Sisyphus-esque page-a-thon and die thrashing the disk about the interior of the machine casing. For all people complain about the OOM killer, sometimes, it's handy!)