Gripe about mickey-mouse VM behaviour on many Unixes

[Ed Schwalenberg]

    From: Tim Bray <tbray at watsol.waterloo.edu>
    Date: 16 Jan 90 03:28:19 GMT

    Good luck, you'll need it.  Here at the New OED project we have got seriously
    cheesed off about VM implementations on many unix systems.  No matter how much
    you have, memory remains a critical resource.

And if you don't have enough, you lose just as badly.  Under System V
Unix for the 386, when your large process exceeds the amount of
non-wired physical memory, the paging algorithm pages out the ENTIRE
process (which takes a LONG time), then lets your poor process fault
itself in again, oh so painfully, until you exceed physmem again and
start the cycle over.