From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: James A. Sutherland Subject: Re: suspend processes at load (was Re: a simple OOM ...) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 21:06:27 +0100 Message-ID: References: <15790000.987706428@baldur> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: Rik van Riel Cc: Dave McCracken , linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: On Thu, 19 Apr 2001 16:13:02 -0300 (BRST), you wrote: >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. Well, good to know our wheel's the same shape as everyone else's :-) >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. Yes. A quick look at how VMS/WinNT implements this strategy might be useful here too; still a good idea, even if MS have assimilated it :-) James. -- 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/