Re: Re: Re: Re: [9fans] system crash during compile

["John Floren" <slawmaster@gmail.com>]

On 7/13/06, Brantley Coile <brantley@coraid.com> wrote:
> > Swap has never worked.  It mostly works, but there have
> > always been hard-to-reproduce and then even harder-to-debug
> > little issues, and I just don't trust it at all.  With memory so
> > cheap, there is little motivation to fix it.
>
> That explains our mail processing problems that we had a few years ago
> when the incoming load was so high that it exceeded local store and we
> turned on swap, but things were still funky.  (wound up limiting the number
> of connections allowed to port 25 at a given time.)
>
> Might I suggest we remove swap from the system, at least remove it
> enough so people don't fall prey to it?
>
> I would argue backing store is a thing of the past and that Sandy
> Fraser's objections to the Plan 9 team early on, as I understand his
> objections to be, were correct.  Let's just use paging to manage the
> store in the box and to perhaps demand load text.  We're a long way
> from tiny, expensive local stores and slow drums.
>
> Let's just take it out.
>
Swap is handy. When you're running on 32 MB of RAM on an old laptop
that you don't want to spend on to upgrade, slow virtual memory is
better than nothing at all. I would volunteer to make swap work, but
it seems like it would be one of those things that's more deeply tied
to the rest of the system (which I don't know well); also, I don't
really know C.

John
--
TANSTAAFL! (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!)