The main purpose of swap memory in a modern computer is to create an alternative to crashing when physical memory is exhausted. Swapping pages out, in the absense of a low memory condition, will probably not yield a significant improvement, and will definitely cause a significant performance penalty when those pages need to be swapped back in. The only time you want to pre-emptively swap is when you are certain a page will never be needed to be retreived quickly, which is a fairly difficult thing to determine.
A secondary purpose for swap is for software suspend or hibernate. Sizing your swap to the minimum required for suspend is important, if you want to use this feature.
The best arrangement is where the operating system can manage the swap size on its own. However, it really hardly matters, as you should never have more active pages than the amount of physical memory on the system. If this happens to you, the solution is to get more RAM, not more swap.
Meanwhile, some of us have been ready for five years or so. Even back in 1996, everyone knew IPng was coming. And hardware has had minimal support for it for almost as long. I'll bet most networking equipment has been purchased subsequently, and probably by people who knew about IPv6, too.
I just wish they'd implement working Internet multicast routing by the time IPv6 reaches the 50% usage mark. Universal access to Internet multicast was one of the promises of IPng, and it really really needs to happen.
Yes, GCC 4.0 builds under Windows. See http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.0/buildstat.html, and the mingw-users mailing list.
I don't think that --gc-sections is nearly as useful as some people seem to think it is. Even on ELF, the only target that supports it, its only supported when doing static linking (which obviously is not a binary size improvement over dynamic linking). Also, the -ffunction-sections option for GCC commonly used with this linker switch can inhibit optimizations. Even when -gc-sections can be used for an improvement, for much C code, it tends not to actually remove very much. The linker already has machinery to merge various sorts of the worst executable bloat, such as duplicate template instantiations. This switch is most useful for various pathological cases that most people, as near as I can tell, don't experience.
If an executable is hugely bigger than it needs to be, your best bet is to examine the executable with objdump to determine exactly what is using up all of this space. Oftentimes its fairly easy to strip out extra unneeded fat.
Aaron W. LaFramboise
Just for perspective, a primary legal battle in Lafayette is desegregation of the public schools. Yes, I'm talking about that thing that most everyone else did back in the 60's.
Theres something wrong with politics here in Lafayette, and Louisiana in general. They say that people here are the friendliest you're going to find, and that's probably true enough. But if you're looking for compassion, tolerance, community, or any of these more sophisticated values of goodwill, you've come to the wrong place.
Its worth pointing out that Lafayette is generally very conservative. For example, the parks here are a joke, and despite having a beautiful river meandering through town, virtually all of its shoreline is in rich people's backyards. Most of the time, its not a question of if something should be privatized, but when and how.
And yes, there are a whole lot of poor people in Lafayette, on the other side of the tracks. One wonders if the other Lafayette posters who feel otherwise have even been to the north side of town.
I had to add the flag -Dmodify_ldt_ldt_s=user_desc to the gcc command line to get this to compile on a Linux 2.6 system with vanilla kernel headers and a vanilla generic glibc 2.3 installation.
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The main purpose of swap memory in a modern computer is to create an alternative to crashing when physical memory is exhausted. Swapping pages out, in the absense of a low memory condition, will probably not yield a significant improvement, and will definitely cause a significant performance penalty when those pages need to be swapped back in. The only time you want to pre-emptively swap is when you are certain a page will never be needed to be retreived quickly, which is a fairly difficult thing to determine. A secondary purpose for swap is for software suspend or hibernate. Sizing your swap to the minimum required for suspend is important, if you want to use this feature. The best arrangement is where the operating system can manage the swap size on its own. However, it really hardly matters, as you should never have more active pages than the amount of physical memory on the system. If this happens to you, the solution is to get more RAM, not more swap.
Meanwhile, some of us have been ready for five years or so. Even back in 1996, everyone knew IPng was coming. And hardware has had minimal support for it for almost as long. I'll bet most networking equipment has been purchased subsequently, and probably by people who knew about IPv6, too. I just wish they'd implement working Internet multicast routing by the time IPv6 reaches the 50% usage mark. Universal access to Internet multicast was one of the promises of IPng, and it really really needs to happen.
Natalie Portman and next shuttle launch: both postponed to March 2006. Coincidence?
Yes, GCC 4.0 builds under Windows. See http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.0/buildstat.html, and the mingw-users mailing list. I don't think that --gc-sections is nearly as useful as some people seem to think it is. Even on ELF, the only target that supports it, its only supported when doing static linking (which obviously is not a binary size improvement over dynamic linking). Also, the -ffunction-sections option for GCC commonly used with this linker switch can inhibit optimizations. Even when -gc-sections can be used for an improvement, for much C code, it tends not to actually remove very much. The linker already has machinery to merge various sorts of the worst executable bloat, such as duplicate template instantiations. This switch is most useful for various pathological cases that most people, as near as I can tell, don't experience. If an executable is hugely bigger than it needs to be, your best bet is to examine the executable with objdump to determine exactly what is using up all of this space. Oftentimes its fairly easy to strip out extra unneeded fat. Aaron W. LaFramboise
Just for perspective, a primary legal battle in Lafayette is desegregation of the public schools. Yes, I'm talking about that thing that most everyone else did back in the 60's.
Theres something wrong with politics here in Lafayette, and Louisiana in general. They say that people here are the friendliest you're going to find, and that's probably true enough. But if you're looking for compassion, tolerance, community, or any of these more sophisticated values of goodwill, you've come to the wrong place.
Its worth pointing out that Lafayette is generally very conservative. For example, the parks here are a joke, and despite having a beautiful river meandering through town, virtually all of its shoreline is in rich people's backyards. Most of the time, its not a question of if something should be privatized, but when and how.
And yes, there are a whole lot of poor people in Lafayette, on the other side of the tracks. One wonders if the other Lafayette posters who feel otherwise have even been to the north side of town.
I had to add the flag -Dmodify_ldt_ldt_s=user_desc to the gcc command line to get this to compile on a Linux 2.6 system with vanilla kernel headers and a vanilla generic glibc 2.3 installation.