On Sun 12/1 Stephen Reed wrote: "because the Cyc KB is currently memory resident we cannot contain the full Cyc KB in Win32"
Stephen I believe this to be a an architectural design problem regardless of whether you are on Linux or Windows. Both operating systems have the capability of virtual memory to swap out the least recently used seqments in memory. In Windows for instance if you made your knowledge base a memory mapped file, at run time it would all be loaded into memory if there was room and the least frequently used segments could be swapped out. In your current architecture you may not hit your head on the memory ceiling as soon but you will eventually hit it. A good architecture should allow your most frequently accessed knowledge to stay resident while infrequently or hardly accessed knowledge remain on disk or virtual memory. This would allow your application to run on machines with much smaller amounts of memory but at a performance penalty. Another approach would be to store knowledge in a relational database. These system also cache and manage the tabel data the first time it is read. If it is frequently accessed it will stay in cache and be accessed and memory speeds. Most RDBMS have superior indexing and will retrieve records much faster from cache than a linear search of memory. If your actual application is written in Java vs. a true compiled language you are also incurring a large performance penalty. In my experience there is no such thing as fast Java. When all of the ERP system vendors switched from client server to web based Java interfaces all their response times went in the toilet. And with all of the R&D dollars Oracle has, if they can't make it run fast nobody can. Larry Ellison bet the ranch on the thin-client being the wave of the future. So far all he has are a lot of dissatified customers! -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On Behalf Of Stephen Reed Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2002 12:19 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [agi] An idea for promoting AI development. On 30 Nov 2002, James Rogers wrote: > On Fri, 2002-11-29 at 19:38, John Rose wrote: > > But if I were building > > a new PC-based AI design, just from my experience, I would jump all > > over Windows and it's offerings ... as well take a side glance at > > Lindows :) At Cycorp, we switched from Symbolics Lisp Machines to Linux three years ago, and although we have a port of the Cyc knowledge base for Win32 we are now blocked by the memory model of Win32 which reserves 2GB of virtual memory for the OS. Linux reserves only 1 GB and because the Cyc KB is currently memory resident we cannot contain the full Cyc KB in Win32 (max user address space is 2 GB) but we can contain the full Cyc KB in Linux (max user address space is 3GB). Another problem with Win32 is price/behavior between desktop Win32 and Server Win32. In desktop Win32, the bias is towards fast Office application launch time and you will find server applications suffering in that memory paging occurs even if sufficient RAM exists. The Win32 server OS is much more expensive and still does not completely solve this performance problem. The main problem with Win32 is the total cost of ownership issue, when you multiply the total number of computers (desktops, laptops, servers, work-at-home computers) by the cost of Win32 server + MS Visual Studio, which must be upgraded every two-three years -- Compared to Linux in which upgrades are free and most required software is free. Of course some individuals may find Linux difficult to install for a particular computer, but Cycorp has sysadmins to overcome that problem and we purchase "white box" high performance computers with Linux installed to our specs. At Cycorp we put Win32 on the slowest, oldest computers (for non-technical tasks) and are still running Windows NT on most of those. We put Linux on the majority of our fast AMD boxes which run the Cyc KB best. The Cyc KB uses HTML as its interface so we do not get value from the Windows desktop, and we use java as the main interface language. I have Win2K and WinXP at home on two computers and Linux on my faster home servers. I expect that some year I will retire Win32 and convert mainly to Linux-64 at the rate at which Linux is improving. -Steve -- =========================================================== Stephen L. Reed phone: 512.342.4036 Cycorp, Suite 100 fax: 512.342.4040 3721 Executive Center Drive email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Austin, TX 78731 web: http://www.cyc.com download OpenCyc at http://www.opencyc.org =========================================================== ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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