From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from burns.conectiva (burns.conectiva [10.0.0.4]) by perninha.conectiva.com.br (Postfix) with SMTP id DC55416B39 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 16:13:02 -0300 (EST) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 16:13:02 -0300 (BRST) From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: suspend processes at load (was Re: a simple OOM ...) In-Reply-To: <15790000.987706428@baldur> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Dave McCracken Cc: "James A. Sutherland" , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Dave McCracken wrote: > --On Thursday, April 19, 2001 19:47:12 +0100 "James A. Sutherland" > wrote: > > > Well, it was my proposal when I first said it :-) > > Oops. My apologies. I'd lost track of whose idea it was originally :) Actually, this idea must have been in Unix since about Bell Labs v5 Unix, possibly before. And when paging was introduced in 3bsd, process suspension under heavy load was preserved in the system to make sure the system would continue to make progress under heavy load instead of thrashing to a halt. This is not a new idea, it's an old solution to an old problem; it even seems to work quite well. Incidentally, the "minimal working set" idea Stephen posted was also in 3bsd. Since this idea is good for preserving the forward progress of smaller programs and is extremely simple to implement, we probably want this too. regards, Rik -- Linux MM bugzilla: http://linux-mm.org/bugzilla.shtml Virtual memory is like a game you can't win; However, without VM there's truly nothing to lose... http://www.surriel.com/ http://www.conectiva.com/ http://distro.conectiva.com/ -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/