Re: swap cache

Alain Williams (addw@phcomp.co.uk)
Thu, 24 Dec 1998 12:17:31 +0000


On Mon, Dec 21, 1998 at 11:23:11AM +0100, Rik van Riel wrote:
> The cost of I/O is in seek time and not in disk read/througput
> time. Compression will only reduce the already cheap part but
> does nothing about the expensive seek times...

The cost of swap I/O is sometimes much greater: eg swap over NFS as some
versions of UNIX manage.

One related item which would be nice is to be able to keep binaries (ie
a.out files) compressed, decompressing them when they are run. This
would help where disk space is short and where binaries are loaded over
at network (many office networks are hopelessly overloaded).
Decompression is cheaper than compression and could help in some
situations.

To really work well this would have to also have to work with compressed
shared libraries.

-- 
Alain Williams

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