🚀 go-pugleaf

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

[ ... NeXTStep does reuse space within swapfile ... ]

> 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).   

Well, I can see that's no point with your system: you have a seperate swap  
partition or dito disk. I don't, so swap space is competing with news,  
mail, uucp and user disk space directly here. Now I don't mind using up 50  
Mb in a Mathematica run sometimes (if I know I have the space), but I  
would like it to be returned by the time I finish MMa. I still fail to see  
why that's such a problem - given that NeXT doesn't want to dedicate  
workforce to solve it. If the OS is capable of finding free pages within  
the swap file between beginning and end, it is also capable of garbage  
collecting the file. The additional work is just updating a few vm related  
structures ...

> 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.

Well, we would be better off if the OS just killed off (and reclaimed the  
swap file space of) a non-critical app. The point is - of course - that  
the OS has little inkling what apps are non-critical :-) Perhaps we should  
supply a configuration file ~/.non-critical-apps :-) :-)

--
Toon Moene (toon@moene.uucp)
Kantershof 269, 1104 GN  Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Tel.: + 31 20 6982029; Fax: + 31 20 6003411
No Disclaimers; a NeXT at home protects against this occupational hazard.