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From: zemon@felix.UUCP (Art Zemon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.ultrix
Subject: excessive swap space requirements
Message-ID: <8550@felix.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 8-Oct-87 14:34:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: felix.8550
Posted: Thu Oct  8 14:34:19 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 12-Oct-87 19:25:49 EDT
Sender: zemon@felix.UUCP
Organization: FileNet Corporation, Costa Mesa, California, USA
Lines: 27
Approved: zemon@felix.UUCP (Art Zemon)

Ultrix still has the old and now thoroughly outdated
algorithm of allocating swap space to a process when the
process is spawned instead of when the process actually
needs to swap.  For some environments this is absolutely
absurd -- and expensive.  For instance, we have an 8700 with
32 Mb of physical memory, 64 Mb of swap space that we never
use because we never swap and almost never page, and we need
MORE swap space because processes are dieing for lack of
core (brk(2) fails)!!

Does anyone know if anyone inside DEC, or even a third party
vendor, is working on an updated memory/swap space
management scheme to eliminate this problem?  I really don't
want to buy more storage which will never be used.

This algorithm made sense when people used PDP-11s with 256K
of memory and many megabytes of disk and they always swapped
at least some.  Now it is cheaper to buy enough memory that
I never swap but I still have to buy the darned disks!

Ahhhhh..., that feels better.  Maybe I can still an old
IBM-PC 30 Mb disk on the 8700 and call it swap space. :-)

	-- Art Zemon
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