From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Jul 14 21: 7:41 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from peach.ocn.ne.jp (peach.ocn.ne.jp [210.145.254.87]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BAB71154C0 for ; Wed, 14 Jul 1999 21:07:38 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dcs@newsguy.com) Received: from newsguy.com by peach.ocn.ne.jp (8.9.1a/OCN) id NAA22659; Thu, 15 Jul 1999 13:07:24 +0900 (JST) Message-ID: <378D5742.3A8C3737@newsguy.com> Date: Thu, 15 Jul 1999 12:36:34 +0900 From: "Daniel C. Sobral" X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.6 [en] (Win98; I) X-Accept-Language: pt-BR,ja MIME-Version: 1.0 To: John Nemeth Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, tech-userlevel@netbsd.org Subject: Re: Swap overcommit (was Re: Replacement for grep(1) (part 2)) References: <199907142001.NAA16574@vtn1.victoria.tc.ca> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG John Nemeth wrote: > > } > But that isn't always the best process to have killed off... > } > } Sure it is. :-) Let's see... > > This statement is absurd. Only a comptetant admin can decide > which process can be killed. No arbitrary decision is going to be > correct. We are talking about what process the OS should kill automatically when it reaches this situation. What is the criteria that should be used? Is the "biggest process" the "best" process to be killed? Or is there another, better criteria? In this context, the statement makes perfect sense, even if you disagree with it. > } interesting, and a good implementation will very probably be > } committed. *BUT*, this is not as useful as it seems. Since the > } correct solution is buy more memory/increase swap (correct solution > } for our target markets, anyway), there is little incentive to > } implement it. > > In case you hadn't noticed, this debate is cross-posted to > NetBSD. NetBSD's target market isn't the same as FreeBSD's target > market. This answer is NOT the correct solution for NetBSD's target > market. Heck, except for one rather vocal person, FreeBSD's target > market may not consider it to be the correct solution either. I most > certainly do not consider it to be correct, and I admin a lot of > mission critical servers. I noticed, but I do not speak for NetBSD. Well, I do not speak for FreeBSD either, but I have well informed opinions on it. What I say, I say about FreeBSD. As for being "correct", it's really simple. Either you have enough memory, or you do not. If you don't have enough memory, a number of programs cannot function correctly. Sure, some programs might be able to deal with low-memory situations, but *other* programs *cannot* deal with it. It's impossible for them to accomplish their tasks if there is not enough memory. So, if you want that server to accomplish it's job, you need more memory. Which, btw, is cheaper than the man-hours needed to implement SIGDANGER. -- Daniel C. Sobral (8-DCS) dcs@newsguy.com dcs@freebsd.org "Would you like to go out with me?" "I'd love to." "Oh, well, n... err... would you?... ahh... huh... what do I do next?" To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message