On Sun, Nov 19, 2006 at 14:12:01 -0800,
"Craig A. James" <cjames@modgraph-usa.com> wrote:
>
> These were mostly scientific and graphical apps where reliability took a
> back seat to performance and to program complexity. They would allocate
> 100's of GB of swap space rather than taking the time to design proper data
> structures. If the program crashed every week or two, no big deal -- just
> run it again. Overallocating memory is a valuable technique for such
> applications.
I don't think the above applies generally. Programmers need to be aware of
the working set of CPU bound apps. If the program is constantly paging,
the performance is going to be abysmal.