On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, John Anthony Kazos Jr. wrote:Could[/should] this stuff be changed from ratios to amounts? Or a quick boot-time test to use a ratio if the memory is small and an amount (like tax brackets, I would expect) if it's great?
Yes, the "percentage" thing was likely wrong. That said, there *is* some correlation between "lots of memory" and "high-end machine", and that in turn tends to correlate with "fast disk", so I don't think the percentage approach is really *horribly* wrong.
The main issue with the percentage is that we do export them as such through the /proc/ interface, and they are easy to change and understand. So changing them to amounts is non-trivial if you also want to support the old interfaces - and the advantage isn't obvious enough that it's a clear-cut case.