3 ms·

> What use is "full use" if your system live locks!? By "full use" it doesn't mean "get to the point of live-locking". It means if the heuristic is sufficientl

> What use is "full use" if your system live locks!? By "full use" it doesn't mean "get to the point of live-locking". It means if the heuristic is sufficiently conservative so as to prevent live-locking, it will also necessarily prevent usage patterns that wouldn't live-lock.

mrob 7y ago
If you refuse to drive without wearing a seatbelt, you're not making full use of the vehicle. The conservative heuristic "always wear a seatbelt" will protect you in a crash, but it will also necessarily inconvenience you even in usage patterns where you wouldn't crash. Safety and reliability improvements are very rarely free. It's my opinion, and I assume wahern's, that Linux should be reliable by default, even if this reduces efficiency in the non-failure case.
- dtech 7y ago
  A seat-belt is a really bad comparison because there's almost zero cost to enabling it. A better comparison is a car that will only go to 100 km/h on a 120 km/h road. It's safer, less accident prone and more energy efficient and you will never need to brake because of hitting the speed limit, but you're not making full use of the car.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Yes, because something like an engineering margin or extra capacity for unpredictable situations is a bad thing. /s People do not learn. No safety margin means things will fail so you need to expect failure. Even if you do expect failure, there is a chance of unexpected kind of failure. Failures tend to be much more costly than the extra capacity. And that's in predictable systems, not something as unpredictable as say an ssh server.
  - brazzy 7y ago
    > A seat-belt is a really bad comparison because there's almost zero cost to enabling it. Watch some documentaries about the time wearing seatbelts became mandatory and listen to people bitch how inconvenient, uncomfortable and dangerous (what if the car catches fire and the seatbelt gets stuck???) they are...
    - floatingatoll 7y ago
      People still drive without seatbelts today, and still run into their windshield during minor accidents and die. But when they do, they will quietly be considered “at fault for” or “complicit in” their own death. They chose the convenience of “no seat belt” (no swap) over the reduction to “risk of death” (oomkiller) Their friends will still blame anything and anyone other than them for the circumstances leading up to their death, but in unguarded moments, they’ll say “I wish they’d worn a seatbelt”. They blame the person that died for failing to take an obvious step of self-preservation, even if they don’t realize it. Swap paging files have not reached this level of awareness, but we’re certainly a lot closer than we used to be to understanding as a community why modern system design requires paging files to operate in a dynamic memory allocation, generic work task, variable usage and specification environment. If you don’t, you’ll end up crashing into the overcommit windshield someday. Is overcommit good? No more or less good than cars than can go 150mph (as their speedometers universally claim). They’re both design choices that no one has seriously objected to, and that means that seatbelts and swap files are necessary.

mrob 7y ago

If you refuse to drive without wearing a seatbelt, you're not making full use of the vehicle. The conservative heuristic "always wear a seatbelt" will protect you in a crash, but it will also necessarily inconvenience you even in usage patterns where you wouldn't crash. Safety and reliability improvements are very rarely free. It's my opinion, and I assume wahern's, that Linux should be reliable by default, even if this reduces efficiency in the non-failure case.

dtech 7y ago
A seat-belt is a really bad comparison because there's almost zero cost to enabling it. A better comparison is a car that will only go to 100 km/h on a 120 km/h road. It's safer, less accident prone and more energy efficient and you will never need to brake because of hitting the speed limit, but you're not making full use of the car.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Yes, because something like an engineering margin or extra capacity for unpredictable situations is a bad thing. /s People do not learn. No safety margin means things will fail so you need to expect failure. Even if you do expect failure, there is a chance of unexpected kind of failure. Failures tend to be much more costly than the extra capacity. And that's in predictable systems, not something as unpredictable as say an ssh server.
- brazzy 7y ago
  > A seat-belt is a really bad comparison because there's almost zero cost to enabling it. Watch some documentaries about the time wearing seatbelts became mandatory and listen to people bitch how inconvenient, uncomfortable and dangerous (what if the car catches fire and the seatbelt gets stuck???) they are...
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    People still drive without seatbelts today, and still run into their windshield during minor accidents and die. But when they do, they will quietly be considered “at fault for” or “complicit in” their own death. They chose the convenience of “no seat belt” (no swap) over the reduction to “risk of death” (oomkiller) Their friends will still blame anything and anyone other than them for the circumstances leading up to their death, but in unguarded moments, they’ll say “I wish they’d worn a seatbelt”. They blame the person that died for failing to take an obvious step of self-preservation, even if they don’t realize it. Swap paging files have not reached this level of awareness, but we’re certainly a lot closer than we used to be to understanding as a community why modern system design requires paging files to operate in a dynamic memory allocation, generic work task, variable usage and specification environment. If you don’t, you’ll end up crashing into the overcommit windshield someday. Is overcommit good? No more or less good than cars than can go 150mph (as their speedometers universally claim). They’re both design choices that no one has seriously objected to, and that means that seatbelts and swap files are necessary.