alt Hacker NewsInteresting post, it made me wonder. At one time FreeBSD swap usage/logic was far better than what Linux did. Is that still the case ?
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Yes, It's just not every tool is aware of ZFS ARC. Which is what this post is about. Author just describes in an odd way.
I remember how NetBSD promoted itself as running on many more toasters than Linux once.
Then some NetBSD dev wrote on their mailing list that this is no longer true. Linux runs on more toasters now. (And also top 500 supercomputers, but toasters are the real metal to the petal test.)
These fights always remind me of:
https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html
It's an interesting piece of history too. I kind of evaluate it a bit differently, e. g. my summary is "momentum beats academic perfection". Which is not completely what it is about, but it is my own imperfect TL;DR summary.
FreeBSD didn’t have memory overcommit and instead used strict swap reservation - each allocated anonymous memory page was supposed to have a corresponding swap page. This required 2x RAM swap space, otherwise you would get “out of swap” when forking a large process. FreeBSD implemented memory overcommit around 2000.