swap space

[Thaddeus P. Floryan]

In article <1991Jun13.065207.10089 at ucunix.san.uc.edu> adams at ucunix.san.uc.edu (J. Adams - SunOS Wizard) writes:
>[...] Thus,
>the notion of swapping to one device and paging to another is
>impossible.

Not with DEC's VAX/VMS.  There's both a "swap" and a "page" ``file''.  (Gawd,
I never thought I'd be defending VMS, the penultimate Vomit Making System :-)

>[...]
>I am unsure of one other point:  As I understand it, the total (not the
>per-process limit, which is clearly 2.5MB) virtual address space of the
>UNIX-PC is 4 megabytes.  If this is in fact the case, increasing the
>available swap partition beyond its default maximum of around 4.5 MB
>(to allow for alternate blocks, filesystem overhead, etc.) cannot
>result in any benefit. [...]

Not true.  As I discovered earlier this year while having gcc compile the
"ephem" program in the background and doing some other "online" emacs and
gcc work, increasing the swap partition on my HD from the default multi-user
5MB to 12MB made a BIG difference (those processes simply would NOT run
before ("Out of swap space"); now they do.)

Thad Floryan [ thad at btr.com (OR) {decwrl, mips, fernwood}!btr!thad ]