Re: VM20 behavior on a 486DX/66Mhz with 16mb of RAM

John Alvord (jalvo@cloud9.net)
Tue, 19 Jan 1999 15:09:04 -0500 (EST)


On Tue, 19 Jan 1999, Stephen C. Tweedie wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 16 Jan 1999 14:22:10 +0100 (CET), Andrea Arcangeli
> <andrea@e-mind.com> said:
>
> > Setting an high limit for the cache when we are low memory is easy doable.
> > Comments from other mm guys?
>
> Horrible --- smells like the old problem of "oh, our VM is hopeless at
> tuning performance itself, so let's rely on magic numbers to constrain
> it to reasonable performance". I'd much much much much rather see a VM
> which manages to work well without having to be constrained by tricks
> like that (although by all means supply extra boundary limits for use in
> special cases: just don't enable them on a default system).
>
We have at least one other case where a memory algorithm needed to be
tuned for smaller memory. It was the "target free space per cent" which
had to be larger for small memory machines. There could be a similiar
effect in cache handling. No problem on larger machines, but a big problem
on small memory machines.

John Alvord

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