There should be a special compression method for arrays of ints, because
it happens often that large tables of ints containing small values are
stored. So, for example, in a 4k block, the bytes would become in that
order: 0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, ... 4092, 1, 5, 9, ... and then regular
compression would apply. this would make all 0's straight in line. i
didn't test whether this is good in practice.
if not, could a swap file be stored on a compressed drive? if this seems
a weird idea, i'd say that it depends on the implementation. there could
be optimizations done on the compression.
another idea, this one is mine i believe, is to implement a form of
hierarchical swap system, similar to a hierarchical window system such as
X. You would define, for example, that all processes of common ancestor
(like nice or chroot systems) would run in no more than 8 MB of physical
RAM. This way, a sysadmin could prevent a user from thrashing the machine
that many users use at once, among other things. At a finer grain, a user
might decide to confine netscape in 5 megs of RAM to let other processes
live better. and so on.
well, that was my 0.02 $ (canadian money).
matju
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