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From: john@frog.UUCP (John Woods, Software)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Memory Law
Message-ID: <272@frog.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 21-Nov-85 12:13:59 EST
Article-I.D.: frog.272
Posted: Thu Nov 21 12:13:59 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 24-Nov-85 06:16:35 EST
References: <764@bu-cs.UUCP> <1253@ames.UUCP> <623@down.FUN>
Organization: Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA
Lines: 24

> why wouldn't you be delighted to get rid of the slowest part of the
> memory hierarchy?  or do you like paging and reading disk files because
> it gives the cpu plenty of time to run sendmail?  or do you run just 8
> megs of disk, so more memory is superfluous?  or is the problem that
> you haven't the vaguest idea how to intelligently manage 128 megabytes
> of memory, and running 128 1-meg processes sounds so stupid that you'd
> better just unplug all those extra boards and send them back before
> anything worse happens?
> -- 
> Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus!
> 
*Only* a mere 128 Meg?  X's Eagle drive is over 3 times that size, and I
have seen systems with 5 Eagles on them.

Someone else posted a reasonable explanation of multi-level memory
hierarchies, so I shall just summarize:  No amount of memory is *ever*
"enough", and fast memory costs more than slow memory.

--
John Woods, Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA, (617) 626-1101
...!decvax!frog!john, ...!mit-eddie!jfw, jfw%mit-ccc@MIT-XX.ARPA

Out of my way, I'm a scientist!
	War of the Worlds