Re: Surely 'bzr branch' shouldn't be this slow?

[Lennart Borgman]

On Thu, Jan 7, 2010 at 8:43 PM, Stefan Monnier <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> But it probably thrashes wildly because Bzr ends up using more than
>>> 500MB.
>> Indeed, it eats the memory + 500 MB swap, but there's still 500 MB
>> swap availaible, so I can't explain myself this behavior.
>
> The amount of swap left is mostly irrelevant.  What matters is that
> there more memory in active use than the amount of RAM you have, so the
> system spends its time moving data back&forth between RAM and swap,
> which brings the whole system to a crawl.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrash_%28computer_science%29


Is it the design or the algorithm that are the problem?