ASU - out of memory?

[Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman)]

On Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:07:12 +0200 Esben Stien <b0ef at esben-stien.name> babbled:

> Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org> writes:
> 
> > and luckily those smart fellas in kernel developer land.. made
> > kernel overcommit.. a tunable parameter! and... cunningly.. on the
> > FR (and as wel on my desktop) it's turned off! :) so... a moot point
> > really. :)
> 
> I was more thinking of applications filling up RAM and then things
> will have to be paged out if you don't want things to crash/get
> killed. Something is definitely wrong if you're actually using the
> swap area on this device, but things like this are observable with
> vmstat. Unfortunately, you can't plug in more memory when you see that
> your need exceeds the capacity of the device;).
> 
> A 128Mio space of memory is not that huge, especially if you want to
> use it for something cool and you will at some points pass this mark
> and things will die; given the current algorithm it might not be
> something you want to get killed.

128m is massive. it's unimaginably huge. if you need more you need to look hard
at what it is you are doing, and how. seriously. for the kind of processing
power, storage ability and display ability of this device... - and no. not
saying "640k is enough for everyone". i am saying that 128m is a lot. people
who don't think so are incredibly spoilt. possibly are bad programmers who need
to learn more about memory management or should have their programming licenses
revoked! :) (ok just kidding there). but seriously - it's a lot. this is why
instead of running off to swap for help - which just overflows your ram problems
onto disk (and sooner or later swap fills - then what? you haven't fixed the
original problem - just delayed it).

-- 
Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) <raster at openmoko.org>