swapfile compression

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#2388

From: Art Isbell
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 1992 21:34

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In article <1992Aug29.145719.9180@nic.umass.edu> a74k110@titan.ucc.umass.edu (Chris Lloyd) writes:
>Uh, I *REALLY* Don't think compress=lzw/packbits/etc.  That would be totally
>retarded, not to mention totally unuseable on an '030 and damn near it on an
>'040.  I would gather compressed = compacted in that the holes in the swapfile
>are reused more wisely and the paging system tries to keep the swapfile
>to a minimum ... 
>
>This growing rumor is totally unfounded and technically silly IMNSHO.

I heard a NeXT engineer speak at a BANG Developer SIG a few months ago.  He was
talking about app performance tuning.  He suggested that developers choose to
load up the CPU rather than memory when possible since CPU speeds are
increasing much faster than memory access speeds, especially when memory access
is from a hard disk for paged/swapped data/code.  An example he cited was 3.0's
swaptimizer which compresses paged/swapped pages (requires more CPU resources
but uses less memory resources).  But he said that the swaptimizer was active
only on NeXT machines with mininal RAM (8 MB mono, 12-16(?) MB color) because
the CPU-memory trade-off wasn't so critical on machines with more RAM.

So unless NeXT has changed 3.0's swaptimizer (certainly a possibility), I'd say
this is not a totally unfounded rumor.
-- 

Art Isbell                                                      Cubic Solutions
NeXT Registered Developer #745         NeXT software development and consulting
Email: isbell@cats.UCSC.EDU                                Voice: (408)335-1154
USmail: 95018-9442                                           Fax: (408)335-2515

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!sparky!uunet!ulowell!news.bbn.com!olivea!hal.com!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!cats.ucsc.edu!isbell
From: isbell@cats.ucsc.edu (Art Isbell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc
Subject: swapfile compression
Message-ID: <17oqh9INN92p@darkstar.UCSC.EDU>
Date: 29 Aug 92 21:34:33 GMT
References: <15175@umd5.umd.edu> <dillon.0mmg@overload.Berkeley.CA.US> <1992Aug29.145719.9180@nic.umass.edu>
Organization: Cubic Solutions - NeXT software development and consulting
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