der Mouse <mouse@Collatz.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> wrote:
> Hm, self-tuning, that sounds like (a) a really cool idea and (b) a
> maintenance nightmare when it goes wrong.  When will you have a sample
> implementation ready for us to experiment with?

I have a MicroVAX 2000 running VMS, and VMS has a self-tuning mechanism
(autogen).  And indeed, the first time I used it it tuned itself into an
unusable state, which made an essential command fail, which in turn made
it impossible to login. Basically, what autogen was doing was to adapt
perfectly to a situation of extremely light load, which was the case in
a time perod before tuning but which resulted in too conservatively set
system parameters to do anything at all.

In other words: be very careful with self-tuning systems.

> 					der Mouse
-Olaf.
--
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert      D787B44DFC896063 4CBB95A5BD1DAA96 
\X/ Ceci n'est pas un Magritte          rhialto@polder.ubc.kun.nl