Re: Break 2.4 VM in five easy steps

[Mike A. Harris]

On 6 Jun 2001, Miles Lane wrote:

>> Precicely.  Saying 8x RAM doesn't change it either.  Sometime
>> next week I'm going to purposefully put a new 60Gb disk in on a
>> separate controller as pure swap on top of 256Mb of RAM.  My
>> guess is after bootup, and login, I'll have 48Gb of stuff in
>> swap "just in case".
>
>Mike and others, I am getting tired of your comments.  Sheesh.

And I'm tired of having people tell me, or tell others to buy a
faster computer or more RAM to work around a real technical
problem.  If a dual 1Ghz system with 1Gb of RAM and 60GB of disk
space broken across 3 U160 drives is not a modern fast
workstation I don't know what is.  My 300Mhz system however works
on its own stuff, and doesn't need upgrading.

>The various developers who actually work on the VM have already
>acknowledged the issues and are exploring fixes, including at
>least one patch that already exists.

Precicely, which underscores what I'm saying: The problem is
acknowledged, and being worked on by talented hackers knowing
what they are doing - so why must people keep saying "get more
disk space, it is cheap?" et al.?  That is totally nonuseful
advice in most cases.  Many have pointed out already for example
how impossible that would be in a 500 computer webserver farm.

>It seems clear that the uproar from the people who are having
>trouble with the new VM's handling of swap space have been
>heard and folks are going to fix these problems.  It may not
>happen today or tomorrow, but soon.  What the heck else do you
>want?

I agree with you.  What I want, is when someone talks about this
stuff or inquires about it, for people to stop telling them that
their computer is out of date and they should upgrade it as that
is bogus advice.  "It worked fine yesterday, why should I
upgrade" reigns supreme.

>Making enflammatory remarks about the current situation does
>nothing to help get the problems fixed, it just wastes our time
>and bandwidth.

It's not like there is someone forcing you to read it though.

>So please, if you have new facts that you want to offer that
>will help us characterize and understand these VM issues better
>or discover new problems, feel free to share them.  But if you
>just want to rant, I, for one, would rather you didn't.

Point noted, however that isn't going to stop anyone from
speaking their personal opinion on things.  Freedom of speech.

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    Mike A. Harris  -  Linux advocate  -  Open Source advocate
       Opinions and viewpoints expressed are solely my own.
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