[rescue] G4 pricing

[Peter Corlett]

On 17 Aug 2006, at 19:50, Joshua Boyd wrote:
[...]
>> In any case, disk is cheap and you might as well have loads of swap
>> on a Linux box and use it to back tmpfs on /tmp, /var/spool/exim4/
>> cache and so on.
> Sure, that makes sense for very high memory usage systems and servers,
> but I'm not sure it makes sense for desktop systems with sufficient  
> ram,

Don't look at it as swap space, look at it as a special filesystem  
that aggressively holds data in RAM and avoids flushing out to disk  
unless it has to. There are real, measurable, performance gains to be  
made here on anything but the most lightly-loaded systems.

Linux's VM system does some really cute things that you lose out on  
if you don't have swap, such as speculatively swapping out long-term  
idle processes and reusing the RAM as disk cache for programs that  
are actually running. A Linux system with "sufficient RAM" will still  
show some swap usage for this very reason.

> I suspect that turning it off would be a good idea on many OSs when
> running audio and/or video applications, but I don't know that for
> sure.  If I ever had a Mac with sufficient ram, I certainly would give
> it a shot.

I gather that OSX really hates not having swap.