> Combine the two thoughts, and you have a fine-tunable paging system.
> It would certainly be nice to have the ability to establish how much
> swap you *really* need (and how little you can get away with), instead

On the linux lists, this usually leads to the leap of having a daemon
that monitors available free virtual memory and adds and removes swap
on demand... I think it even got implemented (as an independent
daemon) in spite of all the ranting about why it was such a bad idea :-)

			_Mark_ <eichin@kitten.gen.ma.us>
			The Herd of Kittens

ps. why is it a bad idea? mostly because if you're swapping hard
enough to need more, do you want yet-another-daemon around (1) eating
ram (2) trying to get enough cycles to add more swap [ie. it might not
be effective, especially if things grab space quickly...] It's more
that it doesn't really solve the problem it sets out to. (Really, what
you want is what Apollo Domain/OS had -- as a side effect of other
parts of the Multics-inspired design, free disk could be consumed for
swapping just as easily as for files, and returned dynamically as well...)