In message <20011025233652.B11248@spathi.chuq.com>, Chuck Silvers writes:
>your observations support a theory I've had for a while,
>which is that the interactive performance problem is really the combination
>of two different phenomena:

> - application data gets paged out to swap when arguably it shouldn't.
> - other i/o in the system is swamping the disk, so reading anything back in
>   takes a really long time.

Oh, very good point.  It would be particularly interesting to see if the
system ever pages a block of Mozilla *back* out while trying to page it
in.  :)

>it's the combination of these two things that is really bad.
>everyone's been focusing on the first issue,
>but alleviating the second issue should also improve
>interactive performance a lot.  we need to address the
>second issue even if the first issue is addressed,
>and maybe the second issue will turn out to be easier.

That's a very good point.

-s