Subject: Re: Swap overcommit (was Re: Replacement for grep(1) (part 2))
To: Jason Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>
From: John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 07/13/1999 23:18:58
On 14-Jul-99 Jason Thorpe wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Jul 1999 16:56:26 -0700 (PDT) 
>  Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
> 
>  >     You have to consider the probability of an event occuring, not just
>  >     the possibility that the event might occur.  If the probability is 
>  >     one in a million years, then it is not something you need to worry
>  >     about relative to other things that, perhaps, you *should* be worrying
>  >     about.
> 
> Having been a systems programmer and systems administrator at a
> university computer science department, dealing with large (well,
> they were large back then :-) systems where 60 students log in
> simultaneously to do their "Data Structures in C++" homework, I
> can guarantee you that the probability that someone else's buggy
> program will kill your unrelated application is a lot more than
> "once in a million years".
> 
>         -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@nas.nasa.gov>

What does that have to do with overcommit?  I student administrate a undergrad
CS lab at a university, and when student's programs misbehaved, they generate a
fault and are killed.  The only machines that reboot on us without be
explicitly told to are the NT ones, and yes we run FreeBSD.

---

John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu> -- http://members.freedomnet.com/~jbaldwin/
PGP Key: http://members.freedomnet.com/~jbaldwin/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.freebsd.org