I find it a bit strange that you'd expect to be able to run binaries 100
   times as large as the average program was 10 years ago, while building the
   [more size discussion]

Your points are valid, but I run into behavior I don't like with only
moderate bloat.  In my case, I am running gnome2 and firefox-gtk2 (and
running a full build of course) on i386 with 512 MB (IBM T30).  With
2.0_BETA, I find that if I don't touch the browser for several
minutes, it all gets declared inactive and paged out, and there is 250
MB or so in the file cache.  I'm sure the file cache helped with the
build speed, but I suspect there's a fair bit of 'sequential' file
access that the cache doesn't help (no, I have no data).  This
behavior annoys me, though, because when I switch to the browswer it
pages in for 10s of seconds.  If I had a small browser it would still
be paged out - the working set fits in memory, and I think the problem
is that 'interactive' programs that haven't been touched for a long
time get paged out to free up memory after the file cache uses it all.


Perhaps we should have two times, one for normal clock hand, and one
that's more like an hour, and have limit file cache somehow to only
compete with the slow clock hand.   I have no good insights on how to
do this, though....

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>