Re: swap cache

Horst von Brand (vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl)
Sat, 19 Dec 1998 16:23:10 -0400


ramak@wipinfo.soft.net (Ramakrishna K) said:

> Also i was thinking about one of the other suggestions that was made
> regardin g the compression of a page(s) to a portion of the RAM, and
> uncompress it as part of the swap back in. Although the
> compression/un-compression has to be measured against the I/O cost.

Not only. Your CPU can be happily computing away at process A while
process B pages in some. However, if this "pagein" is really "uncompress a
page from RAM", your process A looses the use of the CPU. Might be a win
in (mostly) one-process (i.e., one-user) machines, but I wouldn't loose
sleep over that: Today's one-user PCs are mostly grotesquely overpowered
anyway, and the added complexity isn't worth a minor performance advantage
for personal use, IMVHO.

Or is there something else I'm overlooking here?

-- 
Horst von Brand                             vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl
Casilla 9G, Viņa del Mar, Chile                               +56 32 672616

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