On Saturday 22 December 2007 09:49, Aaron Kulkis wrote: > Joe Sloan wrote: > > ... > > > > If you look at boinc, it's possible to do this with clever > > programming, completely in userland. When we've run boinc, the load > > average on the box rises to the point that you'd think the box is > > in trouble, judging from load average indications, but then you > > notice that everything is still quite responsive. > > "clever programming" is something I was a big fan of when > I was in high school and college in the 1980's. Then I > got out into the real world, where "clever code" usually > translates very quickly into "unmaintainable code."
You're talking about gratuitous cleverness. And you're right to say that its rarely justifiable, but there's also "sophistication," which can be justified, though it _must_ be justified and justified by something other than the author's or designer's sense of self-satisfaction. So using sufficiently sophisticated techniques to regulate the demand on system resources produced by, say the Beagle indexer (or a BOINC client task or the Google Desktop indexer) is justified, because for personal desktops or workstations, interference with the user's tasks is unacceptable. But it's also true that there's tremendous amounts of unused cycles and I/O bandwidth. So a program like the Beagle indexer has to be smart enough about the load it offers to get its work done as quickly as possible without interfering with interactive use. I'm pretty sure this is what Joe meant by "clever programming" in this context. > ... Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
