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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Ignorance speaks loudest (was:Computers for users not programmers)
Message-ID: <5074:Feb1506:14:1591@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 15 Feb 91 06:14:15 GMT
References: <1991Feb14.195906.5726@news.arc.nasa.gov> <14696@lanl.gov>
Organization: IR
Lines: 18

In article <14696@lanl.gov> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
  [ dropfiles ]
> They don't require extra disk space
> since the system has to allocate space for a swap image anyway.

This is another Jimism that I'm getting sick of hearing again and again.
If you have a machine with N bytes of memory, forced dropfiles waste N
bytes of disk space. This will remain true no matter how many times Jim
insists otherwise. Dropfiles also make the system much slower in the
common case that you don't do much swapping.

Would it be useful for processes to survive through crashes? Maybe. I
just don't want to slow my system down and waste 16 or 128 megabytes of
disk space to get that reliability. If a user thinks his computation is
truly critical, he can easily checkpoint it himself, wasting a lot less
memory and time than forced swaps ever will.

---Dan