Please ignore my mail... It was uninformed and not constructive. I should've
reread it and thought about it more. Sorry.

On 7/25/07, Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
> Jos Poortvliet wrote:
>
> > Nick
> > has been talking about 'fixing the updatedb thing' for years now, no
> patch
> > yet.
>
> Wrong Nick, I think.
>
> First I heard about the updatedb problem was a few months ago with people
> saying updatedb was causing their system to swap (that is, swap
> prefetching
> helped after updatedb). I haven't been able to even try to fix it because
> I
> can't reproduce it (I'm sitting on a machine with 256MB RAM), and nobody
> has wanted to help me.
>
>
> > Besides, he won't fix OO.o nor all other userspace stuff - so
> > actually,
> > he does NOT even promise an alternative. Not that I think fixing
> updatedb
> > would be cool, btw - it sure would, but it's no reason not to include
> swap
> > prefetch - it's mostly unrelated.
> >
> > I think everyone with >1 gb ram should stop saying 'I don't need it'
> > because
> > that's obvious for that hardware. Just like ppl having a dual- or
> quadcore
> > shouldn't even talk about scheduler interactivity stuff...
>
> Actually there are people with >1GB of ram who are saying it helps. Why do
> you want to shut people out of the discussion?
>
>
> > Desktop users want it, tests show it works, there is no alternative and
> the
> > maybe-promised-one won't even fix all cornercases. It's small, mostly
> > selfcontained. There is a maintainer. It's been stable for a long time.
> > It's
> > been in MM for a long time.
> >
> > Yet it doesn't make it. Andrew says 'some ppl have objections' (he means
> > Nick) and he doesn't see an advantage in it (at least 4 gig ram, right,
> > Andrew?).
> >
> > Do I miss things?
>
> You could try constructively contributing?
>
>
> > Apparently, it didn't get in yet - and I find it hard to believe Andrew
> > holds swapprefetch for reasons like the above. So it must be something
> > else.
> >
> >
> > Nick is saying tests have already proven swap prefetch to be helpfull,
> > that's not the problem. He calls the requirements to get in 'fuzzy'. OK.
>
> The test I have seen is the one that forces a huge amount of memory to
> swap out, waits, then touches it. That speeds up, and that's fine. That's
> a good sanity test to ensure it is working. Beyond that there are other
> considerations to getting something merged.
>
> --
> SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
>