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. > >Among the tunables were how much memory for cache, how much for buffers, >how much for X/Y/Z, high and low water marks for all sorts of memory >related stuff and a very valuable attribute bit for executables called >the "sticky bit". It is not the "sticky bit" as used now. It said lock >this app in memory and never swap it. A variation on that (couldn't keep >original semantics with the size of apps these days) would address some >of the "responsiveness" issues raised by some. Some admin tunables would >address the other issues. > >The "Gurus" need to learn something my father taught me. "A smart man >learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of >others". I'm really smart. :-( And, apparently, so are the "Gurus". To >think they have VM this long and no one has thought to swipe these good >ideas from real UNIX. And they're still argueing about all that as if it >has never been hashed out and addressed before. > > When I started out in UNIX, it was Interactive 1.3, if I remember, and it was a dog. Coming from a DOS world, I guess I was overwhelmed by all the things that could be tuned in the kernel. I probably didn't learn much about them then, and still don't know a lot about it, but unless you actively try some of the suggestions and see how things work or behave, then I guess you still don't know. There seems to have been some built in tradeoffs over the course of the years in the unix-like OS's, but it's still seems to work the same. I wonder how well Interactive 3.4 would stack up to today's versions of CentOS, all the *BSD's and such. -- Sam W.Drinkard -- sam at wa4phy.net http://wa4phy.net Augusta Area Mesonet cell 706.825.8513 Home 706.868.7253 MAIL 4428 Branchwood Drive, Martinez Georgia, 30907-1304