Les Mikesell wrote:
On Mon, 2006-06-05 at 17:00 -0400, William L. Maltby wrote:
I can't resist. Read the thread that was pointed to on lkml. ROTFLMAO.
*Real* UNIX addressed these problems long ago. I guess the "Gurus" suffer from NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
Given a "general purpose" system, tunability is a must. UNIX, as delivered by USL in such examples as Sys V, had tunables that let admins tune to their needs. A single "swappiness" value is woefully inadequate.
Actually, having these computed dynamically is much better than having to manually tune them every time your mix of programs change or you add memory except in some very unusual circumstances like a server that does a single job forever. In the general case consider whether you'd rather hire an expert admin to keep your system tuned or buy an extra gig of ram and let the OS figure out how to use it.
Well, technology marches on. These days, it's extremely cheap to throw hardware at the problem. It really wasn't that long ago that a gig of RAM would have cost a month or two (or more) of a typical admin's salary. :-)
Cheers,