6 ms·

that's funny, like avery complex or "smart" algorithm, if it works it's cool, but when something doesn't work, it makes it very hard to pinpoint a culprit. I'm

that's funny, like avery complex or "smart" algorithm, if it works it's cool, but when something doesn't work, it makes it very hard to pinpoint a culprit. I'm more and more inclined to either use stupider algorithm that at least I can explain to the user, incremental stuff where they can check intermediate results or taking into account the fact that this algorithm has to be conveyed to users in one way or another since inception. I guess in this case a measure of the swap activity would be a good indicator that the current limiting factor is the RAM, but it also has to be credible. Somehow having 16G written on the box of the ram and 7G written in the "available ram" of a software makes everything more credible that saying "I have a pressure of 1.5madeupunit on the ram front". Human factors, again.

lamontcg 13y ago
I've been doing performance analysis and debugging as part of being a unix/linux sysadmin now for something like 20 years. And even though I have many well-cherished anecdotes about explaining the VM free list to software architects who were the go-to guys for the vision of our entire global platform, complete with PhDs, I still don't want to go back to the bad old days without a shared buffer cache. There's a reason why that's there, and you don't want to go back to 1992-era memory management. It also makes perfect sense from the perspective of writing the software. The free list really is the list of VM pages that have been free'd and that has a specific meaning, and changing that name internally would be terrible. You just need to understand how the machine actually works.