Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 17 Apr 1996 12:08:59 +0100 (BST) | From | Peter Jaeckel <> | Subject | Single task swap performance (was: Re: Unices are created equal, but ...) |
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Hi !
Linus wrote >On 15 Apr 1996, really kuznet@ms2.inr.ac.ru wrote: >> I have Pentium 133 64Mb AIC7881 and run program >> that eats >=128Mb of virtual memory (certainly, matrices). > >Agreed. This is one case where linux doesn't do anything clever at all, >and one place where we should probably do some work. It happens for a lot >of scientific calculations. [...]
Here is a user's comment, I hope you don't mind my interfering with your discussions:
I am a scientist and I do a lot of calculations. I know a _lot_ of other scientist who, like me, would love to be able to do their calculations on their local pc rather than sharing cpu time on a mainframe. One of the main reasons we can't do that is lack of memory on local pc's and the unbearably low speed of jobs that go over the physical memory limit in comparison to ones that fit into the memory. I haven't run any tests and can therefore not comment on the performance of linux. I would think that a good share of the potential serious user's of linux out there have something to do with academia, science, research, or otherwise with number crunching or large data set analysis. For instance, a friend of mine is thinking of setting up a P200 with linux for medical MRI image processing of 3D high-resolution scans of the human skull. He, like me, would use the linux machine mainly as a single user single task performance machine and, like me, wouldn't mind the minor delay time increase when changing tasks as much as a speed decrease for large single task jobs.
In other words, I merely want to second the suggestion that a single task optimised/improved swapping algorithm might be desirable. Maybe as a compile time option ?
Sincerely and gratefully for your outstanding development work,
Dr. Peter Jäckel Joint European Torus
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