Re: currency based virtual memory

[Niels Möller]

Matthew Sackman <address@hidden> writes:

> Suppose x people are logged into one machine and are using it with
> similar workloads. Then, say one person wants to compile an
> application. With the economic model it would *appear*[0] that what
> would happen is that in order to optimise the global system, the system
> would delay that compilation as being too memory exhaustive and too cpu
> intensive.

No, that's not what's expected to happen. What should happen is that
the processes owned by the user that runs the compilation will suffer
more paging than processes owned by other users. (Of course, there are
lots of different ways to configure the resources, but that's the
idea, at least).

And when memory gets scarce, the price rises, and each user needs to
give back unused memory to the system in order to afford memory for
important processes. 

And it's all about the physical memory, space on the swap should be free, or at
least a lot cheaper than physical memory.

/Niels