On Wed, Jan 27, 1999 at 10:27:15PM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote: > Six orders of magnitude?? In the unlikely event that my 100 MHz SDRAM can > really handle 32 bits (4 bytes) per cycle, then it can transfer 400 > megabytes per second. It's not REALLY that fast, but I'll give it the > benefit of the doubt.
Let me note I was replying in the context of huge swap files on huge hard disks. Tim's (and I think Ben also) example is the best one in this case: the seek time for a hard disk (~ ms) vs the access time for ram (~ ns) suddenly become important when you are talking about ~ GB of RAM. If you are talking about big databases where access is basically random, access time can become a serious bottleneck. But my original comment was posted because of someone's intention to put util-linux 2.9g on slink to get it "in sync" with 2.2 kernels (> 128 MB swap on a single partition) so this is rather off-topic. Marcelo