Re: pre8: where has the anti-hog code gone?

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>]

On Sun, 14 May 2000, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> 
> > How does it feel performance-wise?
> 
> This is a bit hard to say, as my testbox is headless. However, I started
> Netscape on it (over a 100Mbit network) and did a "make -j2 bzImage" at
> the same time. Netscape didn't seem to suffer, but there was usually about
> 30 megabytes[1] ram free (according to "top"), so maybe it is to agressive
> in freeing memory.

No, it's probably not too aggressive in freeing up memory, it's just that
a kernel make is a very "wellbehaved" benchmark MM-wise.

Why? Because the kernel make will start up a lot of processes that are
short-lived in comparison to the whole build (I bet this is the first time
anybody called gcc "short-lived" - it's one slow compiler - but
comparatiely it is).

So the kernel make will actually keep noticeable amounts of memory free
"on average", simply because of processes exiting..

		Linus

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