[ILUG] Out of Memory

[Paul Jakma]

On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, David Murphy wrote:

  Well, you can buy anything up to an E6500 as an "Enterprise 3D" system
  with graphics cards in, so in theory your workstation could be a large
  SMP box 8)

:) 

hold on.. i need to get a toilet roll.. 

Although, if i wanted a high-end workstation i'd go for an Onyx2 with
Reality Engine.. :)
  
  But seriously, any OS that can be brought down by a web browser isn't
  going to be taken very seriously (by me).
  
but it's more a question of philosophy.

The bigger commercial Unices do a lot of bean counting and VM
policy in kernel, and still don't get it right 100% of the time. (but
at a cost).

Linux therefore says, if you can't reliably secure the VM from
dodgy userspace using kernel heuristics, then bugger don't even
try. Go and let the admin set up the machine in the best way possible
to avoid OOM. (which you need to do on commercial unix too if you
want to be sure to avoid OOM)

  > We're talking desktop uniprocessor machines, and that was the
  > context in which i made my point that linux wins in speed - to which
  > people replied "ah but what about large SMP boxes"..
  
  You _were_ saying Linux wins in speed, then people mentioned SMP, then
  you said Linux wins in speed on uniprocessor boxes - I won't move the
  goalposts if you won't 8)
  
well i was talking about uniprocessor the whole time. I didn't
specifically say uniprocessor, cause i didn't think anyone would
think i was daft enough to try and claim linux could outperform
sol/t64/irix/unixware on large SMP setups. :)

so i didn't move the goalposts.  


-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie
PGP5 key: http://www.clubi.ie/jakma/publickey.txt
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Fortune:
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		-- Prof. Romas Aleliunas, CS 435