On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 2:36 PM, Bill Bogstad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm confused. Won't the XS servers always have swap/paging space?
Paging is tolerable for batch processes, or for interactive stuff that is not subject to timeouts (let the user wait while we bring OpenOffice back from swap). Network services and swapping don't mix well at all - they just timeout, which leads to users perceiving it as "crashed", hitting "refresh" if available, and in our case perhaps volunteering a "fix" in the form of a hard reboot. Ouch. If you look at apache and other web-services tuning strategies, the *first* thing they do is ensure that the working set _never_ touches swap. As soon as any network service gets swapped out, it's unavailable for all intents and purposes. Processes sitting idly in memory are wasteful unless they have a ton of state in them to make them valuable. And even then, in many cases they can just marshall that data, and pick it up later (lots of exceptions for this - connection poolers for example). We are working on what amounts to an embedded device - so we are going to HTFU on memory usage :-) cheers, m -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- School Server Architect - ask interesting questions - don't get distracted with shiny stuff - working code first - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel