>> Also, it's broken, broken, broken on Plan 9 > > but could you describe what antisocial behavior it exhibits and how one > could reproduce this behavior? i have never used to-disk paging on plan 9, > so i don't know. >
Well, when I used it on an old 32 MB laptop (terminal) and a 64 MB desktop (cpu server), swap would seem to work all right until you hit about 30-40% usage. This was the case with both systems; when I asked about it, a couple other people mentioned the same behavior. The thing is, it's pretty hard to test swap under normal usage; the only time I ran into this problem was while compiling a new kernel. >> and nobody wants to fix it. > > this has been a good discussion so far. let's not go off in a bad direction. I was just noting that when it has previously come up, the general consensus is that nobody wants to fix it, which is actually pretty reasonable--I'm guessing, as has been mentioned before, that the number of people who could potentially need/want swap is very low, especially since memory for older computers seems to grow on trees (around here at least). > >> The upside to this is that we can just say how we don't want it anyway, >> there's no conceivable reason anyone would want swap, and operating >> systems with working swap suck ;) > > not sure how to parse this. is there a particular case where you need to-disk > paging? i don't see the use of to-disk paging. perhaps my vision is limited. > > in the one case where i might find it useful -- in embedded systems, there's > typically more ram than persistant storage, so paging to "disk" makes no > sense. > It's primarily old systems, I think, like that old laptop which wasn't worth finding more RAM for. When I set up this shiny high-spec cpu server, I let it put in swap space "just in case", but a couple users barely put a dent in that, so it will probably never be used.
