🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Apr10.052219.5103@cubetech.com> andrew@cubetech.com (Andrew Loewenstern) writes:

   In article <FOX.92Apr8102030@graphics.nyu.edu> fox@cs.nyu.edu (David Fox)  
   writes:

   >  I set hiwat and it had absolutely no effect.  Even if hiwat did
   >  work, the tiny difference between NeXT and Sun is that the Sun
   >  will release the swap space once it is finished.  The NeXT just
   >  fills up the space available and then dies.
   >  
   >  -david


   No it doesn't.  Although NeXTstep doesn't physically make the swapfile smaller  
   it does reuse the space within it:

   Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
   /dev/sd1a              98442   97172       0   104%    /private/vm/swapdisk

   This is my swapdisk.  It has been like this for several days and I've been  
   using tons of vm since then (I can hear the drive grind away when I use vm).   
   If what you said was correct, my machine would have gone down in flames a long  
   time ago.  Although the swapfile itself is huge, there is lots of free space in  
   it.  Even if hiwat worked, what is the poor computer supposed to do when it  
   runs out of memory?  It could die a little bit more gracefully though.

Ok, the thing is, I need that 100 meg back.  I would have preferred to
be told I couldn't run a process becauses there is insufficient swap
space rather than have it run and then fill up both swap _and_ disk
_and_ die a slow horrible death.  I've often exhausted swap on SunOS
and been told so with no adverse effect apart from the mercifully quick
death of a (randomly selected?) process.  (I haven't tried setting
hiwat correctly yet, but I haven't heard anything good about the
result of doing _that_ either.)

-david